OS onto a new in it's own partition

[acclu97]

My buddy helped me build my system and now I am building one for my girlfriend and I am on my own. The way he set up my system is by installing windows onto one partition and then left the majority of the rest of the hard drive on a seperate partition. The reason that he did this is so that when I reinstall my os, I still have all my saved documents in the 2nd partition and dont have to back them up.

I would like to do the same thing on my girlfriends computer but am not to sure how I can do this. I am also not sure what I have to do once I have set up all the hardware; Do I turn it on with the os disk in the drive? Will it automatically go into bios?

Im just not sure what to expect or what to do, help would be appreciated!

[emericanchaos]

here's a link from the Storage section of this messageboard.

http://forum.oc-forums.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=115746

that should give you what you need

[sangapski]

check this link...
http://fdisk.radified.com/

and yeah, Storage section should be able to help you out more

[Milkman]

First you will need to setup the bios parameters, I would set it to boot from a Windows startup disk, then run Fdisk to set up your primary partition,you can split the drive in two or set it up with just a small second partiton, I will usually install all my drivers,saved files etc.. onto the second partition just in case I have to reformat, that way I don't have to hunt for the Cd's later, I also use Drive image and backup my complete partiton so restoring it is a snap.

-mamer