My sister's hardrive currently has 2 partitions: c: (main drive) and d:
(recovery drive). The c: is very large at 128 GB and is 95% empty. I'd like
to partition it at least 3 ways, in the hopes that her machine will work
faster.
Changing the partition structure of the drive will not make it work
any faster. In fact, by spreading out the files there, it can increase
the time needed for head movement to and from them, and may even make
it slower.
Two more points regarding partitioning schemes:
1. What do you mean by recovery drive? Is that the manufacture's
recovery partition for reinstalling Windows (ugh! I hate those, since
a hard drive will leave you with nothing) or a backup partition? If
the latter, be aware that that's the weakest form of backup there is.
2. How will you use those three partitions? Many people recommend
separating the operating system and installed applications on
different partitions because think that if they ever have to reinstall
Windows, their applications will remain. They are wrong. Even if your
applications are installed on a partition separate from that the
operating system is on, you can *not* reinstall the operating system
without losing the applications. The reason is that all applications
(except for a very occasional near-trivial one) have entries and
pointers to them within Windows, in the registry and elsewhere. With
Windows gone, all those entries get lost, and the applications get
broken. So that benefit goes away.
Some people recommend putting the page file on a partition of its own.
That too is counterproductive because it puts it farther from the
other frequently-used data on the drive and thereby increases the time
it takes for head movement to and from it. For best performance, the
page file should normally be on the most-used partition of the
least-used physical drive. For almost everyone with a single hard
drive, that is C:
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 of the entire drive, then a single 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.
However, Window's Disk Management program isn't providing me with
the option of doing this and Window's Help doesn't provide much info on
partitions. Does anyone know how to partition a hard drive (without the use
of 3rd party software) or what I'm doing wrong?
You're not doing anything wrong. Unfortunately, no version of Windows
before Vista provides any way of changing the existing partition
structure of the drive nondestructively. 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.
