User Guide

Appendix E E-6
♦ If one or several of your HDD are old, and if you don’t want to erase the
data stored in your drives, you will have to remember the parameters
(Type, Cylinders, Heads, Sectors, Mode) of the drive(s) you don’t want to
erase. After you have used the IDE HDD Auto Detection option in the
CMOS, enter the Standard CMOS Setup Menu to change the settings
of the related hard disk drive.
Software use:
The basic step in using a hard disk drive is to make a HDD Low Level
Format, than run FDISK, and than FORMAT the drive. Most of present
HDD have already been subjected to low level format at the factory, so you
probably can skip this operation.
Boot with a bootable floppy disk, then enter FDISK.
Using FDISK: (DOS command)
This command is found in the DOS disks.
FDISK is a tool used to organize and to partition the hard disk. The hard
disk must have been partitioned before use. You can create one unique
partition on the hard disk, or create several partition and use a different
Operating System on each partition. Just don’t forget that you have to
specify an Active partition, otherwise your hard disk will not be bootable.
For further information about FDISK, refer to the FDISK section in the
DOS user’s manual.
After you have partitioned the hard disk with FDISK, the system will reboot
automatically. Boot from a system floppy disk, and type FORMAT C:/S
Using FORMAT: (DOS command)
This command is found in the DOS disks.
FORMAT is used to format the hard disk. The HDD have to be
formatted before use. Don’t forget to add /S after C:, otherwise the hard
disk will not be bootable after formatting.