partitioning a hard drive.

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steve.uk

i have read an article on auhma about planning partitions and the advantages
of putting windows xp on its own partition etc etc. does anyone know any
other good articles on the subject. i plan to use partition magic 8.0.

i am interested in the fact that i have read which says that you can put
your program files in their own partition "but close to c:". how do i ensure
that they are situated on the hard drive in a particular place, and more
importantly, how can i ensure that the program files end up near to the 'c'
partition.


is will the disk be set out according to drive letter, i.e, if i use 'z'
does it automatically go to the back of the drive and if i use 'f' is it as
near to 'c' as i can get?

should i change the drive letters of my cd rom and dvd drives from 'd' and
'e' to 'y' and 'z' or does it not work like this at all?

thanks.
 
-----Original Message-----
i have read an article on auhma about planning partitions and the advantages
of putting windows xp on its own partition etc etc. does anyone know any
other good articles on the subject. i plan to use partition magic 8.0.

i am interested in the fact that i have read which says that you can put
your program files in their own partition "but close to c:". how do i ensure
that they are situated on the hard drive in a particular place, and more
importantly, how can i ensure that the program files end up near to the 'c'
partition.


is will the disk be set out according to drive letter, i.e, if i use 'z'
does it automatically go to the back of the drive and if i use 'f' is it as
near to 'c' as i can get?

should i change the drive letters of my cd rom and dvd drives from 'd' and
'e' to 'y' and 'z' or does it not work like this at all?

thanks.


.
When you partition the drive and I assume you have only
Click to expand...
one drive (C), the partitions you create will be numbered
D,E,F etc. Physically on the drive these virtual drives
will be located in ascending order from C. your cdrom will
be renamed as the next after your HDD names. Hope this
helps.
 
1st off, partitioning is a good idea, and Partition Magic is the way to go.

2nd, the OS assigns drive letters to the partitions in the physical order
they are on the disk. Let's take a for instance...

Primary (bootable) partition will be c:\ Then you will create an extended
partition for the entire rest of the disk. Inside this extended (no drive
letter) partition will reside all your logical partitions, each being
assigned a drive letter by XP in ascending fashion. If one logical, it will
be D:\, if a second, then E:\, F:\ and so on for however many partitions you
choose to create.

Then, after all the primary and logical partitions have been assigned drive
letters, XP will assign the next corresponding letter to your CD drive. In
the above example, the CD drive would be G:\. If you had two drives, the
following one would be H:\ and on and on.

What you could do at this point, if you wanted, would be to assign higher
drive letters to the CD drives. For instance, instead of the above example
allowing XP to assign G & H, you could make the two CD drives Y & Z, or
anything else higher than G, if you wanted. This might be beneficial if in
the future you might want to add another physical hard disk, because the OS
ALWAYS assigns drive letters to the physical disks before the removeable
(CD/DVD) drives. So, if you added a physical disk later, your CD drive
letters would change. Which means that all of your program .inf files and
regisrty settings that are looking for a game or program CD at G:\, won't
find it because G:\ is now a logical partition on a second disk.

Hope this helps!
 
that's good.... i have the idea.... i have 2 x 120gb hdd's but they are a
raid 1 config so effectively just one drive.

i have loads of music files and was thinking of creating a partition for
them. what advantages are there to doing this sort of thing or would you
just leave them in the generic music folder that i have on the root of drive
c:?
 
What I do is try to keep as few things on the C drive as possible, basically
just the OS and the paging file. I have one partition that's exclusively
for data (could make this your music partition...), with no .exe's on the
entire partition. I have another that's for all my proggies, and the final
one F:\ is where I install all my games.

That way, all the things that could cause a problem are kept separate from
one another. It has worked good for me

Good luck
 
thanks clark or whatever your name is. just one more thing.........when you
say keep your operating system on c: what do you mean by that exactly? is it
just the 'windows' folder, sub-folders and contents or are there any other
folders that you would class as 'operating system files'. you see, i'm not
doing a clean install but moving stuff around so what do i need to leave on
c:?


thanks.
 
Reality Check

My *best* experience has been based on the premise of doing a clean install
of XP to C: of an already partitioned, empty drive. You can most certainly
partition from where you are at, but the biggest problem is that all of your
proggs are on C: now, and from my experience, moving them might be more time
consuming and frustrating than just starting over.

Of course, it depends on how many proggs you have installed. But to
directly answer your question, if you were to do a clean install, what you
would end up with on C: is "docs and settings", "program files", "recycled",
"recycler", "system volume information", and "windows" folders. Now, within
program files, there may be a bunch of crap that windows did not put there,
and you want to remove as much of it as you can, but that's about all you
want to have on your C: drive.

Put everything else on the other partitions
 
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