FDISK is used to partition drives. There are several drive utilities available that do the same thing. Most western digital hard drives come with their own partitioning software. It works well.
There are several reasons I suggested using a new hard drive.
1. In the place where I work, we see hard drives in our PCs fail often after 2-4 years of service(these are on 24 hours a day). A newer, bigger hard drive can be had for $50.00. If you're going to go through the trouble of loading up the OS and all your software from scratch, you might as well replace the drive now. Kind of like preventative maintenance.
2. He has reported trouble with the software that lives on the existing drive for several weeks/months now. Several folks have suggested viruses and/or corruption. If you go through the trouble of installing a new drive and sticking in the old drive as a spare without formatting it first, you take the chance of migrating the disease to the new hard drive if you run an executable that lives on the old drive.
3. By taking the old disk out(or just disconnecting the cables from it and leaving it in the case), you preserve a snapshot of the system as it sits right now. If your rebuild of the new drive goes nuts, or you need to get back up in a hurry, or you don't have time to continue the rebuild right now, you can always unplug the new drive and go live on the old drive, then pick up the rebuild at a later time that is convenient to you.
4. It never fails that someone will tell me it is OK to wipe out their old drive; they have everything off of it that they need. Two weeks later, they ask,"Is it possible to get one more file off the old drive?". Nope. I formatted it and ran Eraser on it and overwrote every spec of the disk with data 35 times for security purposes.
I agree that a second drive is a good place to make backups to. I make it a habit to keep all my data in subfolders under the 'my documents' folder on my 9X machines and under the 'documents and settings' folder on my XP machines. Then all I have to do to make a backup is copy one folder to the second hard drive or server. I've written a batch file that I schedule which does this automatically. I keep 7 days worth of backups on my second drive on my 98 machine. What it does is deletes the 7th folder, renames folder 6 to 7, 5 to 6, 4 to 5, 3 to 4, 2 to 3 and 1 to 2. Then it creates a new folder called 1 and then copies the data from the 'my documents' folder to the #1 folder using Xcopy with the switches that gets all subfolders and files. Works very well and I've never lost data.
Once you are sure you have all of your data off of your old drive, sure, you can format it and use it for a spare for backups. But don't put it in your machine at the same time your good drive is in there if you suspect viruses. Format it in the machine by itself with the disk utility like FDISK or EZDisk(?) from Western Digital first.
Just my opinion, of course. And maybe over cautious. But better safe than sorry. /forums/images/graemlins/laugh.gif
