Your Own Windows Laboratory

Tweaking the Drive

Step 4: Create a New Primary Partition

Now it's time to repartition your hard drive. This is the dangerous part--you've made your backups, right? Select Start, Programs, PowerQuest PartitionMagic 4.0, PartitionMagic 4.0. Once you're in PartitionMagic, right-click your existing partition--which I'll refer to as your main working environment--and select Resize/Move.

In the resulting dialog box, enter the size of your new test partition in the Increase Free Space After field. What should that size be? The bare minimum is 100MB for Windows 95 and 200MB for Windows 98, but that won't leave you much room for applications. Set it to 500MB--that should be plenty. Remember to leave enough open space in your main working environment. In addition to everything else you do there, you'll soon be creating one huge file (maybe as big as 70MB).

Back in the main PartitionMagic window, right-click the line labeled Free Space and select Create. In the resulting dialog box, select either FAT or FAT32. In the Label field, enter test. In the "Create as" box, check Primary Partition. Don't worry about the warnings. Click OK.

You should see a new partition labeled TEST, with a type of either Hidden FAT or Hidden FAT32, in the main PartitionMagic window.

Exit PartitionMagic, selecting Yes when you're asked if you want to apply your changes, then OK when you're prompted to enter MS-DOS mode. PartitionMagic exits Windows, makes the changes you've indicated, and reenters Windows.

Step 5: Boot to the New Partition

Put the Windows CD-ROM in the CD-ROM drive, and the boot disk in A:. Select Start, Programs, PowerQuest PartitionMagic 4.0, PQBoot. Click Yes to exit Windows and launch PQ Boot, which gives you a choice of partitions to boot. Type 2 and press Enter. PQ Boot reboots your computer.

If your boot disk is a Windows 98 Startup disk, PQ Boot asks what mode you wish to boot into. Select "Start computer with CD-ROM support." When you get the A prompt, type dir c: and press Enter. You should get a "File not found"' message.