<snipped>
thecreator wrote:
Why would you format an entire 300 GB Hard Drive with one
partition?
thecreator,
I snipped everything else because i would like your reasoning
behind your query...
Are you just asking the OP _in particular_ why *they* would choose
to partition/format a 300GB drive as one large partition or do you
have some underlying resistance to doing something like that (and
if the latter - what is the reasoning behind said resistance?)
Always a reason.
The operator was talking about installing the operating system into a 300
GB Hard Drive, unpartitioned or partitioned as a single Hard Drive.
I listen to others and I watched Call for Help and The Screen Savers with
Leo Laporte. He wondered the same thing. He recommended at least 3
partitions. I recommend at least five partitions with 2 Hard Drives or
three partitions to 4 partitions with one Hard Drive.
If running with just one operating system, create a partition of 40 GB in
size for the operating system. Create a second partition for your
Documents. A third partition contains Backups of your E-mails, Favorites,
Address Book and Desktop. A Fourth partition contains images of your
operating system partition.
In this fashion, if you can't boot or the operating system should crash,
you can restore the operating system from a Bootable Rescue CD, if using
Acronis and restore the Backup Image, without worrying about losing your
Documents or Emails if you had been using a Backup program.
Also you can use Partition / Drive Images for experimenting with programs.
Make any sense? And also when doing maintenance on a single large Hard
Drive, often takes longer than when doing maintenance on a small
partition, like running Disk Cleanup or when running the Disk Defragmenter
program.
For Dual-Booting, I would recommend a small partition before your larger
partitions. That partition formatted as a FAT32 partition, would be your
bootable partition that contains your Boot.ini, and system software, so
you can boot the Hard Drive. Then I would have 2 40 GB partitions for the
operating systems. Why have a FAT32 partition? Because you can access it
from MS-DOS. You can't access a NTFS partition from MS-DOS or DOS. Again
make any sense? Takes longer to do, but worth the time and effort.
The problem I see above is that you are using the partitions (at least one
of them) in a method to backup the other partition or parts of it. Not wise
at all *if* that is your only backup.
The files moved elsewhere on the same physical hard disk drive may well be
protected from normal destruction from lesser viruses or if a patch takes
out your operating system and you know what you are doing and you can get
back in (of course - if there was no physical damage - one could boot with a
Windows XP CD or BartPE type CD and do the same thing with the files where
they were originally before the supposed backup.) However - there is no
real protection there from actual disaster. If the hard disk drive dies -
no matter how many copies of the same data you have on the same hard disk
drive - the hard drive may be completely inaccessible to you and thus - all
those copies are too.
In other words - you seem to have taken a single basket, put all your eggs
in it, handed it to someone to transport and are hoping for the best. (You
may actually do more and store actual backups in other places - but given
the design with backups of email/documents on one partition of the same
physical drive and images of the OS partition on yet another partition of
the same physical drive and no mention of external backups... It's not
obvious.)
As for 'experimenting with programs' <- you'd have to define that for me, as
if you are installing something on Windows XP itself - most modern
applications will be putting their tendrils in the system folder and system
registry so having a seperate partition for 'experimenting with programs' in
that sense is a wash. ;-)
As for maintenance times - I see that as a wash - as most regular
file/folder type maiintenance could be performed automatically while the
user is not around. Scheduling a backup, scheduling a defrag, scheduling a
disk cleanup, etc... And if done regularly - it won't take that long
anyway. If you have multiple partitions - you still have to do all that to
each partition. Combined time should be about the same. If you do them all
at once - it will be for sure - as they all share the same pipe in/out
to/from your computer. ;-)
You chose your words very carefully (OS crashes - not hard drive crashes,
etc) and I picked up on that. Very well described and I understand your
rasoning fully.
I believe if one is going to actually prepare for disaster - I would
recommend preparing all-around - not putting everything in one place and
hoping that single point of failure doesn't break entirely.
I see having multiple partitions in a single operating system based system
as useful for only a couple of things:
- Backups - it makes backing up easier on the end user. You just tell your
backup program to backup the entire D, E and F 'drives' to your external
media instead of picking and choosing folders and files.
- Organization (although that truly is the same reason as the other in many
ways) - as many people like to think of things being compartmentalized.
This is more for the peace of mind of the user than anything else -
providing no performance or protective benefit innately - only in the way
the end-user might then utilize those compartmentalized sections.
40GB also is a bit small for modern Windows OSes.
For multiboot systems - you pretty much have to have multiple partitions.
However - for a home user or someone experimenting - excluding if they are
testing some particular hardware, etc - virtual machines is probably easier
to manage and roll-back (when needed) than multiboot systems.
Thank you for the time and response. I do appreciate it. I am always
trying to see if peoples reasons for things include something new, something
that I could recommend to others.
