TheBFG said:
My computer has the disk divided into 2 partitions from when I bought
it. This was done by the manufacturer Sony. So I have a 60GB disk
partitioned into 14 GB for the C drive and the rest for the D drive
My son had just bought a computer but he has no partition on the disk.
He has a 40 GB disk.
We both use NTFS not FAT. on XP home
My question: Should my son partition his disk, especially as he has
installed a lot of games, or is it not really necessary?
If it is a good thing to do, what is the best tools to do this with
without having to format the disk again. I have googled about this
but I get conflicting information.
Thanks for the advice in advance
The reasons for partitioning have waned due to the operating systems
evolving to catch up with the ever increasing disk sizes. At one time,
you were forced to partition because the OS wouldn't handle really big
partitions. Today you don't need to partition but you might want to
anyway. Partitioning lets you separate the type of files you will put
into each. You could have one partition for the operating system and
programs, another for games, another for your data, and a separate
instance of other operating systems in other partitions (so you can
multiboot and pick which operating system you want to use at that time).
Personally, and because I am using only one operating system on my
current home computer, I like to have 2 partitions: one for the
operating system and applications, and another for my data. This way
when I have to eventually do repairs or even do a [fresh] install of the
operating system (and it WILL occur), I can do the OS repair or
reinstall and/or reinstall the applications without worrying about my
data. However, that does mean you need to move all your data over to
the other partition. You can move your My Documents folder easily
enough, but moving over your profile paths (for your account, the All
Users and Default accounts, and all other accounts), and changing
programs to store on the other partition, like for Outlook [Express],
will take time and some digging into. When you reinstall the operating
system or applications, you would then have to reconfigure them again to
point at your data over on the other partition.
Having separate partitions also lets you manage your backups. I save a
drive image of my OS & app partition and only occasionally do logical
backups of it. That's because it doesn't change much and many of the
updates are automatic so a reinstall would be quick from an old drive
image followed up automatic updates. I can then more often perform
backups on my data partition to ensure my backups are up to date but
without all the extraneous files intermixed with it from the OS & app
partition. However, you can also usually configure your backups to list
specific directories or files to include in a data-only backup but I
really don't want to bother traversing all my paths to separate out my
data from the OS and applications.
So it is really a personal choice how you want to slice up your OS,
applications, and data across multiple partitions or pile them
altogether within one partition. This only discusses the use of basic
drives in Windows. You can use dynamic drives to make one spanned
volume that spans across multiple drives, much like RAID span array,
where you can add more drives but they all become part of a single
spanned volume. That way you can add more drives and to increase the
storage capacity of a single drive letter but, as with software RAID, I
suspect you cannot include the OS partition, and reliability of the
spanned volume diminishes with each added drive in the same way it
diminishes with striping in RAID 0 (if one drive dies then the whole
stripe set or spanned volume dies, and the more drives you add the more
likely one will die). There is no fault tolerance in spanned volumes or
striped RAID 0 sets.
