Partitioning a hard drive means dividing it into two or more separate data storage aptly called partitions. A partitioned hard drive will logically appear like two or more separate hard drives. If a hard drive contains two partitions, it would be seen by the operating system as two hard drives and will be installed as drive "C:" and drive "D:" instead of just drive "C:."

Formatting a hard drive means preparing it to the "form" the operating system to be installed expects it to be in. The reason for this is that different operating systems use different file structures or file systems. The old MSDOS and Windows 98 operating system use the FAT file system, Windows XP and Windows Vista use the NTFS file system, and LINUX uses another entirely new file system called EXT3.

Therefore, if you are installing Windows XP, you need to format your hard drive with the NTFS file system, although you may also use the old FAT file system because Windows XP is backward compatible to the FAT file system but you don't usually do this as NTFS is more efficient than the old FAT system.

In the days of MSDOS and Windows 98, you need to partition and format your hard drive before running the operating system's installation. Nowadays, Windows XP or Vista, or even Linux let you partition and format the hard drive during the installation process.

Why would I need to partition my hard drive?

Hard drives today are very inexpensive and 500GB of disk space is all too familiar. You may want to partition your hard drive for the following reasons:

1. You may want to keep your operating system and application software files separate from your data files. In the event that your operating system becomes corrupted, your data files may still be safe and intact on the other partition.

2. When you use utility programs that work on hard drives like the chkdsk program, it would take a lot of time to complete the operation on a hard drive with a big partition,

3. It is possible to install more than one operating system on a single computer which is referred to as multibooting. In multibooting, you may install Microsoft Windows 98 and Windows XP, along with Linux or BSD. In this scenario you need to partition your hard drive to as many operating system you would like to install because they all need to be in their own separate partitions.

How to Format Hard Drive and Install Windows Operating System - Depending on whether you are formatting your master hard drive or slave hard drive the ways of formatting will differ. To format a Slave Hard drive (Not the hard drive with your current Operating System) you can simply format the drive in two ways, these methods are...

How to unpartition a hard drive - As the name indicates, a hard drive partition is part of the drive, or a section, treated by the operating system as an independent storage area or drive. Hence, a 120-gigabyte (GB) drive can be partitioned into several drives, rather than being used as one large drive.

How to FDISK utility to Partition and format your hard disc - Disk partitioning is the creation of portion on the disk that act as though they are independent disk, for example you may Drive E:, F:,C: within a hard disk. When you buy your hard disk it’s not ready for use until you partition it.

Quick Guide to installing a Hard Drive - Thanks to the explosion in the popularity of torrent downloads, many computer users find themselves perennially running out of hard drive space. With new, larger hard drives selling for as little as 15 cents per GB it makes sense to just add new hard drives onto your current system, rather than replacing your current C: drive with a larger one.