Go to the manual partitioning screen.

To do this under System Commander, reboot the system and at the OS Selection menu, select Partitioning.

Remember that you can have 4 primary partitions or 3 primary partitions and 1 extended partition on a hard drive. While you can have multiple logical drives residing in the extended partition, Microsoft operating systems cannot boot from a logical drive.

You can only create a partition in a free space area. Free space, by definition, is unpartitioned space. You may need to manipulate existing partitions in order to generate the free space, such as resize an existing partition smaller.

Once you have the desired contiguous free space, click on the free space so it is highlighted by black bars and then click on the Create button. Chose to create a primary partition with the desired size. Windows 2000 can be installed into a FAT16, FAT32 or NTFS partition. We would recommend that you create and install into a FAT32 partition and then later convert it to NTFS, if you prefer a NTFS file system, during the installation procedure.

FAT16 partitions are limited by size. The maximum FAT16 partition is 2 GB (2047 MB). FAT32 and NTFS have no real size limitations.

Once the partition is created, reboot your computer.

When you reboot, a new selection appears on the OS Selection Menu. This corresponds to the new partition you just created. For a created FAT16 partition it will be labeled "No OS (FAT)", for a FAT32 partition it will be labeled "FAT-32 OS".

With the new partition still highlighted on the OS Selection Menu, press Enter to boot into the new partition.

You should get an error of "Non-System Disk". However you have accomplished an important step. You have made this new partition "active". This partition is now the computer's C drive. This is important because the operating system will choose to install into the C drive by default.

Go to Installing Windows 2000 below.
 

If this fails to boot, you may need to configure your computer BIOS to boot from the diskette or CD before other devices. Your computer and/or BIOS manual should provide instructions to do this.

The Windows 2000 installation will begin.

From this point on, you are in the hands of the operating system's installation program. Remember that you are installing into the new partition, whether created manually or with the OS Wizard. This is the active partition, C drive.

During some point in the installation, it will ask you where you would like to install Windows 2000. This screen will show you all of the partitions and free space on your drive. It is possible to direct the installation to another partition or even another hard drive. You can even create a partition here to install into.

Most users will continue to install into the partition where they began the installation. You will then be given the option to convert the file system from FAT16 or FAT32 to NTFS. This is optional. You should continue with FAT16 or FAT32 if you would like to be able to access your Windows 2000 partition from within Windows 9X or Me. The advantage of a NTFS file system is primarily system security and some advanced Windows 2000 features will only run in NTFS.

Important note 1 - If your computer already has Windows NT running, make sure that it has service pack 4 or above installed. If you are planning on installing NT in the future, we would recommend that you install Windows NT before Windows 2000, upgrade to the latest NT service pack, and then install Windows 2000.

Important note 2 - Different versions of NTFS can corrupt other versions of NTFS. System Commander will automatically hide all NTFS primary partitions from the active NTFS. Keeping these partition hidden from each other is the safest way to proceed. For more information on Super Hiding, please see System Commander FAQ Why can't I see a NTFS data partition from NT/2000/XP/Vista?.

Continue on with the installation.