Dell OptiPlex GXi Reference and Installation Guide ( - Page 88
Partitioning and Logically Formatting Your EIDE Ha..., Installing SCSI Devices
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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 HardDisk Drive(s) Test Group in the Dell diagnostics. See your Diagnostics and Troubleshooting Guide for information on running the diskette-based diagnostics 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, partitioned, and logically formatted before they can be used to store data. Every hard-disk drive from Dell is physically 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 commands 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 operating system. 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. For Windows NT, see the discussion on partitioning and logical formatting in the documentation that came with the operating system. CAUTION: If you format your hard-disk drive under the Windows NT File System (NTFS), you cannot reformat the drive for MS-DOS without losing all NTFS data. See your Windows NT documentation for details. For the UNIX® operating system, refer to your UNIX documentation. Installing 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. 7-10 Dell OptiPlex GXi Mini Tower Systems Reference and Installation Guide
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