Technical information

5.2 Creating DOS Partitions on a PC

As we have seen most of the Atari Hard disk drivers do not provide a utility to create DOS partitions. It

is therefore very convenient to create DOS partitions directly on a PC. If you connect directly a drive

(for example a SCSI drive) to a PC it is possible to create multiple partitions directly. However if you

are using an SD card, connected to a PC card reader, and want to create multiple partitions you first

need to install a specific driver, as explained in Accessing Multiple Partitions from SD Cards.

Windows comes with a reasonable utility for partitioning drives called the Disk Management Console.

You can execute it by executing the diskmgmt.msc command.

You are presented with a

list of all the drives and

the partitions on the

drives.

Your SD card should be

displayed. In the example

on the left the 8GB SD

Card is shown as Disk 5.

When you buy it the card

is formatted by default as

a FAT32 (only format for

partitions ≥ 2GB).

Suppose we want to partition the 8GB SD Card into four 2GB

partitions. We plug the card into a card reader that can handle

SDHC and multiple partitions (for example with the Hitachi

microfilter driver. We first have to delete the existing partition

(normally FAT32) by using the delete volume command.

We now use the new simple volume command. The new

simple volume wizard pops up. We specify the volume size to

1900MB, and in the format windows we select FAT for the file

system and we can keep Default for the allocation unit size.

We repeat the same operation for the three remaining

partitions.

At the end of this process we end up with our four 2GB partitions and we can immediately transfer

information from the PC on them.

Remember that in order to access these large FAT16B partitions on Atari you need to use BigDOS

along with your hard disk driver.

If you want to use a professional application for partitioning I recommend that you use The Hard Disk

Manager from Paragon.