User manual ACRONIS OS SELECTOR 8.0

[. . . ] User's Guide OS Selector 8. 0 Compute with confidence www. acronis. com Copyright © SWsoft, 2000-2002. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. OS/2 is a registered trademarks of IBM Corporation. UNIX is a registered trademarks of The Open Group. [. . . ] Commit: Actually performs all the pending operations. Committed operations cannot be undone, so an additional confirmation is required: · View: Shows the list of all pending operations. The operations are listed not in the order they were invoked, but how they will actually be performed: 6. 6 Getting Help At any time the Disk Administrator can get you context help on the window that is currently on the screen. For more detailed information about Disk Administrator performance it is best to review this User Guide. Aside from usual help features, the Acronis OS Selector package includes a README. TXT file that contains various useful information about system requirements, installation and the last changes that were not yet introduced to the User Guide. You may also visit our web-site for additional updated information ­ www. acronis. com Copyright © SWsoft, 2000-2002 67 Chapter 7. Main Operations with Disk Administrator This chapter covers the following operations with partitions: Creating a Partition Copying or Moving a Partition Resizing a Partition Formatting a Partition Deleting a Partition Changing the Partition Label View Details about a Partition Getting Detailed Information about a Hard Disk 7. 1 Creating a Partition The Create Partition function allows you to create primary or logical partitions. Up to four primary partitions, or three primary and an unlimited number of logical partitions can be on one hard disk. Usually primary partitions are created to install operating systems on them, and logical ones are used for all other purposes like software installation and data storage. If you have several hard disks then you can increase productivity by installing operating systems and software on different disks. For more details about partitions see Chapter 2 «Basic Information». You need free space on a hard disk to create a partition. If there is none, you can create some by reducing the size of one of the existing partitions. Desired position of free space on a disk may be obtained by moving the partitions. Moving and resizing partitions is covered in detail below. Creating a new partition may lead to changes in letter sequence. You should avoid changes in letter assignment for partitions that may be referred to by different configuration files and system registries. Hiding the newly created partition(s) from the operating systems for which they change the letter sequence can do this. See paragraph 2. 9 «Assignment of Letters in Different Operating Systems» for details about tracking the letter assignment for a given operating system. 68 Chapter 7 : Main Operations with Disk Administrator 7. 1. 1 Creating Bootable Partitions Before creating a partition where you plan to install an operating system, you should know the limitations that different operating systems impose on their boot partition. This table sums up such information about several operating systems. Supports Linux Ext2/Ext3 Free space required for installation1 10M 50M 150M 300M 600M 100M 150M 700M 600M Bootable from Second hard disk Operating system Logical partition MS-DOS 6. 22 Windows 95 (MS-DOS 7. 0) Windows 95 OSR2 (MS-DOS 7. 1) Windows 98 (MS-DOS 7. 1) Windows ME (MS-DOS 8. 0) Windows NT 3. x Windows NT 4. 0 Windows 2000 ASPLinux 1 2 +2 +2 ­ + ­ ­ ­ 2G ­ + ­ ­ ­ 8G +2 +2 + + ­ ­ no +2 +2 + + ­ ­ no +2 +2 + + ­ ­ no ­ ­ + ­ + ­ 2G 2G3 ­ ­ + ­ + ­ ­ + ­ + + + + + + +4 ­ + no No ­ Approximate value. ­ With help of Acronis OS Selector and if the partitions are hidden so that the boot partition is labeled with letter C:. 3 4 ­ Fixed in Service Pack 4. ­ Experimental support. Copyright © SWsoft, 2000-2002 Maximum boot code length FAT16 FAT32 NTFS 69 7. 1. 2 Creating a Partition with Disk Administrator Creation of a partition requires the following steps: 1. Choose the desired free space in the partition list. [. . . ] Partitioning is usually done with programs like FDISK. Disk Administrator completely replaces FDISK where functionality is concerned and allows performing many more useful operations. The partition, information about which is contained in the MBR partition table. Majority of operating systems can be booted only from the primary partition of the first hard disk, but the number of primary partitions is limited. [. . . ]