Hard drive partitioning question

  • Thread starter Thread starter Aradur
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A

Aradur

Been lurking in newsgroups and have just realised its a good idea to have
additional partitions on hard drives.

Glad to have opinion/ideas on how best to manage this.

I have two hard drives installed, neither of which have more than one
partition...and both only about 5% used at the mo:-

C: 120gb on which is Windows XP pro, Internet Explorer, Outlook Express, MS
Office, PaintShop Pro, Norton Utilities, Norton Anti Virus and a few other
minor programs

F: 60gb used just for backing up - copies of My Docs, My pics etc

Was thinking changes along the following lines but would welcome comment
from experienced members:-

C: Partition into 1 x 10gb for Windows XP Pro,

1 x 50gb for Internet Explorer, Outlook Express, MS Office, PaintShop Pro,
Norton Utilities, Norton Anti Virus and a few other minor programs and any
additional progs added from time to time

1 x 60gb for data for the above programs

F: Partition into 2 x 30gb for backing up - not sure why though :)

Notes.

1. I'm not a gamer

2. Will it be ok to keep the swap file on the XP partition or is it a good
idea to have dedicated partition for that?

3.Do I need to, or will it be best to start with a clean sheet - ie reformat
the drives, reload windows to the one and then allocate the partitions or is
it possible to/uncomplicated to add the partitions to the drives as they are
now? However I partition either or both drives I'd prefer not to use Fdisk
or other software prog as have had zero experience with - wish to use the XP
pro disc management that seemed to be user friendly when I fixed the two
hard drives a week or so ago.

Many thanks,

Pete
 
I use bootitng, the partition-boot-imaging manager that's only $30, free to
try from bootitng.com. It's a bit confusing for a beginner or even
intermediate, but it's just great.

Their newsgroup info is on this page: http://bootitng.com/support.html

Fred Langa, of the Langa List (http://langa.com), raves about it and uses it
on all his machines.

What you can do:
Partitions: create, delete, move, copy and paste, resize. Have more than
4 primary partitions on a HD (don't check limit partitions).
Images: create and restore from images on HD and CD
Booting: Boot any bootable partition from a startup menu, even on a slave
drive. You can still just see 4 primaries per HD at a time, though there can
be lots of them. Make custom boot menus, log in users with passwords.
 
I could never understand why people want to install their programs to a
separate partition from the operating system partition. Their reasoning is
that if the OS becomes corrupt, they can reinstall or restore the OS
partition from an image file and they won't need to reinstall all the extra
programs that were installed to the other partition. What about all of the
registry entries that the program installation routines make to the OS
registry? They're needed to make the programs interact with the OS and with
the user correctly, but if they're no longer there in the event of an OS
restore or reinstall, well, the programs partition is basically fu'd up and
everything would have to be reinstalled again anyway. Am I right?

What I'd suggest, if you have a 120GB hard disc and a 60GB hard disc, would
be to make the faster of the 2 discs contain the OS partition. Make the
first (C) partition around 10-20GB (NTFS) and install the OS and programs
there. Make a second partition (D) (NTFS)and move the "My Documents" stuff
through windows explorer right after the OS install there (before installing
any programs.) That way, the registry will make the necessary remapping for
your default documents stuff when you later install other programs. You can
partition the second hard disc however you want, but would be great if the
first partition could be 2GB or so (NTFS) to place the OS swapfile for best
paging performance, since the OS is on another physical disc. Partition and
format the remaining space as you see fit for backups, copies of
installation CDs for better install times, etc. You could schedule
automated backups of the files on the first physical hard disc to the
partition(s) on the second physical hard disc, or format one of the
partitions on the second disc as FAT32 for holding partition images or for
accessing through a DOS floppy, etc.

Just my 2 cents.

Sam
remove the obvious to reply
 
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