partitioningthe hard drive

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Guest

hello all,
i have recently bought a dell laptop with 100gb hard disk.i did not recive
any system restore disks wid it.i have xp professional sp2 installed on the
laptop.
now i want to partition the hard disk into three partitions
C:20 gb
D:40gb
E:40gb
is there a way to do it with out using third party softwares? or are there
any free soft wares which allow me to do it?
how do i create a copy of the xp professional OS for the future?
please help me wid this thanks
 
sri said:
hello all,
i have recently bought a dell laptop with 100gb hard disk.i did not
recive any system restore disks
Click to expand...


A CD is optional from Dell. I believe an installation CD is $10 additional
if you order it with the computer. It's possible that it may cost more if
you buy one now, but I don't know for sure; call and ask.

wid it.i have xp professional sp2
installed on the laptop.
now i want to partition the hard disk into three partitions
C:20 gb
D:40gb
E:40gb
is there a way to do it with out using third party softwares?
Click to expand...


Only by starting over with a clean installation. Unfortunately, no version
of Windows provides any way of changing the existing partition structure of
the drive nondestructively.

or are
there any free soft wares which allow me to do it?
Click to expand...


The only way to do what you want is with third-party software. Partition
Magic is the best-known such program, but there are freeware/shareware
alternatives. One such program is BootIt Next Generation. It's shareware,
but comes with a free 30-day trial, so you should be able to do what you
want within that 30 days. I haven't used it myself (because I've never
needed to use *any* such program), but it comes highly recommended by
several other MVPs here.

Whatever software you use, make sure you have a good backup before
beginning. Although there's no reason to expect a problem, things *can* go
wrong.

By the way, why do you want three partitions? How do you plan on using each
of them?

how do i create a copy of the xp professional OS for the future?
Click to expand...


You can't. Call Dell and buy one from them..
 
The last Dell I bought, I forgot to order the CD, when I called 1 week later
to order it they said they'd send it free. It was here the next day!
 
Al said:
The last Dell I bought, I forgot to order the CD, when I called 1
week later to order it they said they'd send it free. It was here the
next day!
Click to expand...


Great! I don't know if everyone can get the same deal, but I'm glad you were
able to.
 
just thought 3 partitions makes it much easier to fragment and less ime
consuming wen running virus scans.
 
sri said:
just thought 3 partitions makes it much easier to fragment and less
ime consuming wen running virus scans.
Click to expand...


I assume you mean defragment, not fragment.

Although some people make multiple partitions for reasons like that, I don't
think those are good reasons. As far as virus scanning, there's no
difference between scanning the three partitions one at a time, or scanning
a single big partition. As far as defragmenting, there might be some overall
savings, but it won't be enormous. Besides, I recommend that defragmenting
be done at night while you're asleep, so it doesn't matter how long it
takes, as long as it's done when you get up in the morning. As a matter of
fact, it's *more* troiuble to have to manually start three defrags during
the night than to start a single one.

My view is that most people's partitioning scheme should be based on their
backup scheme. If, for example, you backup by creating a clone or image on
the entire drive, then as ingle partition might be best. If, on the other
hand, you backup only your data, then the backup process is facilitated by
having all data in a separate partition.

Except for those running multiple operating systems, there is seldom any
benefit to having more than two partitions.
 
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