What is the best way to use my partitions

[Adam]

Hello everone

I have a 80 gb hard disk with 3 partitions. Everything is on my c drive. I
am going to move my data onto the D drive.
1.How do I move my favourites, and Outlook express data and settings etc
onto the D drive and
2.What do I do to make sure that in future they go there automatically.

Also,
3. Is there any advantage to moving my programs, (office xp, Norton, Nero,
etc) onto a seperate drive.
4. Are there any types of programs that generally have to be on the same
drive as the OS


Thank

@dam

Copied (not crossposted) to
XP general, Help and support, basics

 

[Jerry]

First to questions 1 and 2. Use the Help in XP to make sure this is done
properly.

Do the other two partitions have anything on them and have they been
formatted?
If they have not been formatted, then You need to do that first. To format
a hard drive, in MY COMPUTER, Right click on the the drive icon and select
"format". It takes a few minutes to complete the format.

This is the way I setup my Programs drive. First on the drive to be used to
install programs, create a directory called "Program Files". Then inside
Program files, make other directories such as "Applications",
"Communications" "multimedia", "Utilities" etc. Then as I install new
programs, I make a directory named for the application being installed.
Most applications offer an option as to where it will install or you can do
a custom install if that is an option. Then install in the directory that
was created for installation.
If an options is not offered, then the application will install normally on
the OS drive. There is nothing you can do about that.

The 3rd drive I would use for data and downloads. Again setup directories
for download similar if not the same as the ones used in Program Files.
This will help keep your pc organized and easy to find your downloads.

Hope this helps.......... Good Luck

 

[Pavel]

First you need to do properties on My Documents and one of the options you
will see there is Target folder location. You may need to create the
destination folder before you do this. Once My Documents folder is moved to
the new drive, get TweakUI program (free from Microsoft) and use it to
specify where your Favorites folder is. For Outlook Express, you must first
create folder on the new drive. I would normally put it with in My Documents
and call it Outlook Express. Once it is crated, use the Outlook Express
Tools/Options/Maintenance/Store Folder tag to indicate where this folder is.
Programs such as Microsoft Office will automatically know where the new My
Documents is but there are programs that keep data with-in their own program
specific data location other than My Documents. Some of them let you
designate where this is and some you may have to edit registry or some other
means.
As far as installing programs on drive other than the default windows
drive.....I am against it only because I back up my windows using Drive
Image and if parts of the total operating system are scattered on more than
one drive, then it becomes very difficult to restore. And besides, restoring
only the Window portion with out also restoring the program portion may not
work because the registry would then not know about changes on the
non-restored portion.
The good thing about keeping all data on separate drive/portion is that you
can restore the Windows/programs anytime with out overwriting latest data on
the data partition.

 

[Adam]

Thanks all for the 101 in partioning.

Cheers
@dam