While a drive that large should be partitioned into multiple drives,
that is a very odd partitioning.
The first thing that I would do, if I was you, would be to move my
CD-ROM drive (which I presume is Drive D
to "G:", so that the two
partitions of the hard drive are C: and D: (WARNING: There is danger to
this if you have installed applications on what is now drive E:, in
which case, don't do it, it will mess things up. But if your 2nd
partition has only data on it, I'd rather see hard drive partitions as
C:, D:, E: and F: (as required) and CD/DVD drives as G:, H:, I: and J
.
Once you do that, a commercial product called "Partition Magic" will let
you first make the 2nd partition (whether it's D: or E
smaller, after
which you can add the space taken away from it to the 1st partition (C
.
Personally, I'd recommend keeping the system partition (C
to 32
gigabytes or less. Where there is no hard "size limit", performance
suffers somewhat as the drive gets larger (directories and tables on the
drive have to be searched, and it takes time), and after about 32 gigs,
this starts to become significant. If by any chance drive C: is FAT32
rather than NTFS, I'd keep it down to 16 gigs or less if at all possible.
Just a comment, I have a really loaded XP system and my system drive
only has 12 gigs in use. It's really a good idea to keep your DATA on
another logical drive and keep the system drive "smallish", basically
consisting of Windows and all of the installed programs, but not the
data for those programs. I actually formally moved all of the "special
folders" (My documents, My Music, My Pictures, etc.) to another
partition with TweakUI. Keeping your data in a separate partiton from
the Operating system (Windows) and installed programs (the actual
programs themselves) has a number of advantages in terms of backup and
system integrity should things go wrong. Very often a drive (partition)
is damaged, but the damage is limited to a single partition. Also you
usually don't want to backup the operating system and programs nearly as
often as you want to backup your data files (documents, spreadsheets,
photos, music, etc.). All of this is facilitated by using one partition
for the OS and programs and a separate partition for "data" (I use the
term "data" here in the very broadest sense of the word).
Unless you have a need for very large partitions, I'd tend to break a
120 gig drive into not just 2 partitions but even 3 or 4. The exception
to this is if you need a really large partition, for example, if you are
into digital video, you may very well want a single 80 gig partition,
because digital video can easily use 10 to 15 gigabytes per hour of
material, and when editing these files you may need free space equal to
or even greater than the total size of the project. But if you are not
doing digital video, partitions (logical disk drives) larger than 32
gigabytes probably will cause more problems than they will solve.
