KJB said:
Hello all,
I recently had a custom PC built by Velocity Micro. (Awesome
company
to deal with BTW) The system I ordered came with two (2) 750 GB hard
drives (1.5TB total). Before I get too far along and things get out
of
hand, I would like recommendations on the most effecient way to
partition the hard drives.
Ideally I believe (please do correct me if I am wrong) I would like
to
keep the OS, utilities (AV etc) and drivers on it's own partition
(size??? XP Pro). Then a partition for applications only? A
partition
for games? Then possibly several partitions for various data files?
I
do some video editing so I would assume that I should have a rather
large partition set asside for that?
I have never had this much storage space available before and I am a
bit overwhelmed to say the least as to how to setup, control and
administer this monster.
Any recommendations or even a reference site I can browse
If you are going to use this system for playing games, you might want
to consider using multibooting. You install a separate instance of
the operating system into a separate primary paritition and use the
multiboot manager, like GAG (gag.sourceforge.net) which can run from a
floppy or the hard drive, to select which OS to boot. Then when you
install games under the "Windows XP - Game" instance, you won't have
to worry about their copy protection crap from screwing up your
system, some of which runs like a rootkit or a kernel-mode driver that
intercepts your DVD drive and can **** up its operation.
With cloning software, you don't even have to bother doing a fresh
install of the OS and all the apps into the "gaming" partition. Just
clone the OS+app partition into another partition and use the
multiboot manage to pick which one to load (although you will have to
alter the boot.ini in the cloned partition). If you don't want to
isolate the OS under which you install and run games, be aware that
System Restore will do nothing for data recovery. Images and backups
are recommended but they can also be infected. After all, if you have
been playing a game for several months in your only OS partition, it
is likely that you no longer have images going back far enough to
eliminate the infection or copy protection crap, and if you do go back
that far then you lose all the setup for applications that have been
installed since then and those that were installed sometime after
installing the game. That is, it is not always very desirable to lose
everything in having to revert to a backup or image that was created
before the pest that you are trying to eliminate. If not using an
isolated instance of the OS to run games, I'd use a separate partition
for games. That way you don't have to include them when imaging the
OS+app partition. Games are easy enough to install and they'd waste a
lot of backup storage to include them in backups or images of the
OS+app partition.
Put the OS and applications in one partition and all your data in a
different one. After installing Windows, you can even change where
"My Documents" (or your entire user profile), Favorites, and other
data folders are stored, so move them to the data partition. TweakUI
helps with moving some of those special folders but not all. Then
when you have to do a fresh install of the OS (because you don't have
images for recovery or they're infected, too) then you don't lose your
data.
Even if you create one partition for the OS and another for
applications, way too many applications will still install some of
their files into the OS partition. Microsoft's products are nasty
this way but so are many others. Some don't even attempt to use the
partition identified by %SystemDrive% but simplistically use drive C:
for some of their files although you wanted to get all of the
application installed on something other than the C: drive. I found
it a losing battle to separate the OS and application partitions and
just put them in the same partition. After all, if you have to
restore Windows, you are also wiping the registry which means your
applications probably won't work properly because none of their
settings are in the new instance of the registry. I usually takes me
an evening to do a fresh install of Windows XP and all the updates,
another 1 or 2 evenings to go through all the tweaks again, including
tweaks for the data paths, and another couple evenings to install all
my software and all the tweaks for those. The time it takes you to do
the registry hacks to get the apps that were left from the old install
of Windows to work under the new install of Windows is probably longer
than just installing them again.
Put the OS and apps on a partition on one drive and the data partition
on the other drive. Then use backup software to save files from one
partition to another on the other drive, and visa versa. That way, if
a drive fails, you still have your backups on the other drive.
Mirroring does NOT protect your data but is just a means of fast
*hardware* recovery. Mirroring allows you to quickly bring your
system back online due to a drive failure but it does not protect your
data. You might want to also save a copy of backups on removable
media since whatever kills one drive, like a surge, could wipe out the
other. Store the backups on removable media somewhere else since
they'll burn up with your computer if you store them together.
