Partition and format

[Ron Patterson]

I just built my own computer for the first time. I relied on XP to format
and partition the HD.
On my old Win 98 computer I had a 10 gb HD. I used less than 3 gb.
My new HD is 120 gb (smallest I could buy at Fry's was an 80 gb and 120 gb
was cheaper with rebate.)

If I recall correctly I choose to use the NTFS format system as opposed to
FAT 32 - good or bad?
I made a 12 gb partition for xp and left the rest of it unpartitioned -
good or bad?
If I recall, 8 gb of the 120 gb was reserved for some other use? Is this
normal? Please teach.

The A. Baba
Blue Master

 

[John Barnett - MVP]

The ntfs file system is far more secure and less likely to
crash. So your choice is a good one.
Your second question is ok too. I do have an 80gb drive
and i allow 20gb for windows XP. However i do have a
number of applications that need a lot of disk space. You
might also like to create another partition of say 2GB or
more to house any data you want to backup.
Your third question, the actual amount is 8MB and this is
perfectly normal. This is needed by the ntfs file system,
so there is no need to worry about that.

Hope this helps

John Barnett - MVP
Associate Expert

 

[S.Heenan]

I just built my own computer for the first time. I relied on XP to
format and partition the HD.
On my old Win 98 computer I had a 10 gb HD. I used less than 3 gb.
My new HD is 120 gb (smallest I could buy at Fry's was an 80 gb and
120 gb was cheaper with rebate.)

If I recall correctly I choose to use the NTFS format system as
opposed to FAT 32 - good or bad?

NTFS has several advantages over FAT32. Unless you happen to be dual-booting
with Win95/98/ME, NTFS is the way to go.

I made a 12 gb partition for xp and left the rest of it
unpartitioned - good or bad?

That's plenty. I'd recommend 4GB minimum for Windows XP.

If I recall, 8 gb of the 120 gb was reserved for some other use? Is
this normal? Please teach.

When hard drive maker advertise a hard drive, they refer to the size in
"billions of bytes", a base 10 number. In your case that would be
120,000,000,000 bytes. Windows considers a kilobyte to be 1024 bytes, which
is a base 2 number, 2^10. Cube 1024 bytes and you get a GB equalling
1,073,741,824 bytes.
120,000,000,000 divided by 1,073,741,824 equals 111.759GB. Note, this has
nothing to do with formatting or the choice of file system.
A small ~8MB partition is used by Windows for the Master File Table or MFT.

 

[Ted]

120,000,000,000 divided by 1,073,741,824 equals 111.759GB. Note, this has
nothing to do with formatting or the choice of file system.

You pillock, it has everything to do with formatting and the choice of the filing system, since formatting, and what system one chooses, arranges the the storage space into binary formed clusters.

 

[S.Heenan]

"S.Heenan" wrote in message



You pillock, it has everything to do with formatting and the choice
of the filing system, since formatting, and what system one chooses,
arranges the the storage space into binary formed clusters.

Thanks for the enlightened opinion.