Dell OptiPlex Gxi - Manual (Page 88)

7-10 Dell OptiPlex GXi Mini Tower Systems Reference and Installation Guide
13. Enter the System Setup program, and update the
appropriate Drive category (0 or 1) under Drives:
Primary.
See “Drives: Primary and Secondary” in Chapter 2.
After you update the System Setup settings, reboot
the system.
14. Partition and logically format your drive as
described in the next subsection.
15. Test the hard-disk drive by running the Hard-
Disk Drive(s) Test Group in the Dell diagnostics.
See your Diagnostics and Troubleshooting Guide for
information on running the diskette-based diagnos-
tics and troubleshooting any problems that may
occur.
16. Install your operating system on the hard-disk
drive.
Refer to the documentation that came with your
operating system.
Partitioning and Logically Formatting
Your EIDE Hard-Disk Drive
EIDE hard-disk drives must be physically formatted, par-
titioned, and logically formatted before they can be used
to store data. Every hard-disk drive from Dell is physi-
cally formatted before it is sent to you.
NOTE: On systems with hard-disk drives larger than
2 gigabytes (GB), create a primary partition of 2 GB and
divide the remaining capacity into partitions of 2 GB or
less. For example, a system with a 2.5-GB hard-disk drive
would have a primary partition of 2 GB (drive C) and a
second partition of 500 megabytes (MB) (drive D).
Hard-disk drives must be partitioned this way because
MS-DOS–based operating systems (including
Windows NT when using a file allocation table (FAT)
16 file system) do not support drive partitions larger than
2 GB.
To partition and logically format your hard-disk drive,
use the program(s) offered by your operating system.
For MS-DOS, use the fdisk and format commands to
perform these procedures. The fdisk and format com-
mands are described in the MS-DOS reference
documentation.
For OS/2, see the discussion on partitioning and logical
formatting in the documentation that came with the oper-
ating system.
For Windows NT, see the discussion on partitioning and
logical formatting in the documentation that came with
the operating system.
For the UNIX
®
operating system, refer to your UNIX
documentation.
I
nstalling SCSI Devices
To use SCSI devices in your Dell computer, you must
have a SCSI host adapter card, which comes with its own
SCSI cable. This cable can be used to attach a variety of
SCSI devices (hard-disk drives, tape drives, and so on).
The SCSI host adapter configures the devices attached to
it as one subsystem—not as independent devices.
Although SCSI devices are installed essentially the same
way as other devices, their configuration requirements
are different.
SCSI Configuration Guidelines
For details on configuring your SCSI subsystem, refer to
the documentation that came with your SCSI devices
and/or your host adapter card. The following subsections
offer some general guidelines.
CAUTION: If you format your hard-disk drive
under the OS/2 High Performance File System
(HPFS), you cannot reformat the drive for
MS-DOS without losing all HPFS data. See your
OS/2 documentation for details.
CAUTION: If you format your hard-disk drive
under the Windows NT File System (NTFS), you
cannot reformat the drive for MS-DOS without los-
ing all NTFS data. See your Windows NT
documentation for details.