Solutions: Hard drive has Thinkpad owner thinking

By JOHN TORRO

© St. Petersburg Times,
published October 29, 2001

Q. I have an IBM Thinkpad, which is about a year old. The hard drive is partitioned into a C: and a D: drive. The C: drive is 1.99 gigabytes and FAT16. The D: drive is 4.03GB and FAT32. I am puzzled as to why the C: drive is smaller and is partitioned with FAT16, which wastes disk space. Most programs automatically go into the C: drive. The D: drive is twice as big and has the more efficient FAT32. I know that I can convert the C: drive to FAT32 but I hesitate to do so because IBM must have had a reason for dividing the hard drive in this manner. Do you see any reason for this arrangement? What are the problems I might run into if I convert this drive?

A. There may be device driver issues specific to FAT32 and the IBM Thinkpad. This would be the only reason I can think of as to why IBM formatted your disk this way. Check with IBM support to verify this. Ideally, you would want the entire 6GB formatted as one 6GB FAT32 drive, thereby taking advantage of the smaller cluster size as well as several other FAT32 advantages. You could do that by using FDISK and repartitioning. However, you would lose all your data. Products such as Partition Magic from PowerQuest (www.powerquest.com) can merge logical partitions without losing data and may be worth the $70 purchase price. Although it has solicited passionate reader response in the past, I contend that there is no real advantage to creating logical disk partitions on single drives where there is only one operating system installed.

Changing desktop icons

Q. Windows desktop icons are boring. At work, on my Mac, it's easy to download cooler ones and change them in seconds. On Windows, it has been tricker. I know how to exchange one boring Windows icon for another already on my hard drive, but each time I've downloaded sets of Windows-compatible icons and tried to use them, I either hit a "what do I do next?" wall or, the one time I was successful, the new icons disappeared after the next boot-up, exchanged for standard Windows icons. Any idea what I'm doing wrong?

A. I'm not sure which method you're using to replace the desktop icons, but this is the recommended way to change them:

1. Click Start, Settings, then click Control Panel.

2. Double-click the Display icon.

3. Click the Effects tab.

4. In the Desktop icons area, select the icon you want to change, then click Change Icon.

5. Select the icon you want to use or click Browse to look for icons in a different location.

Hard drives go missing

Q. When starting up Windows 2000, I get the following message: "Primary Hard Disk Drive 1 not found Secondary Hard Disk Drive 1 not found. Strike the F1 key to continue, F2 to run the setup utility."

A. This is your BIOS telling you that it cannot find a hard disk on your system. If your system continues on normally after hitting F1, most likely drivers are being loaded that allow Windows 2000 to recognize your hard drive. Otherwise, you'll need to check your data ribbon connections and maybe even the disk jumpers to make sure they are properly configured. Check your motherboard and disk drive technical information. These are usually easily found at the vendors' Web sites.

Sorting the Address Book

Q. Is there any way to get my Address Book to line up the names listed as I want and not alphabetically as the computer wants to set it up?

A. In the Windows Address Book menu bar, click View, Sort By. You will see the various sort options available, which are Name, E-mail Address, Business Phone and Home Phone. You also can click on the column heading in the display area to do the same. It doesn't look as if you can add your own custom sort fields to this list. However, the Business Phone and Home Phone fields allow alpha/numeric information and you might be able to use one of these fields to enter information that you could then sort.

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