Partitioning new harddrives

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Four weeks ago, my computer went stupid on me.
My daughter was playing her educational game and it started rebooting. I did
all of the requisite spyware/adware,virus scans ad-nauseaum. Finally, I did a
repair install of XP and I thought it solved the problem but noticed other
strange goings on such as all of my drive letters have changed and I started
getting disk errors.
I ran chkdsk and it found some problems on my H drive.
( c drive is my original 20 GB system drive, D drive is one of my DVD
burners , E drive is the other DVD burner. F,G and H are three seperate,equal
partitions on a 120 GB harddrive).
Dskchk locked up at 54% of phase 5 on H drive requiring a hard shutdown. I
left it run for hours with no change.
I have since bought 2 new 100 Gb hard drives and want to replace both the 20
and 120 Gb drives with these.
I have read just about everything I could find on the most efficient
partitioning scheme's and discovered there is no clear concensus.
I want to do this right the first time so:
1) Do I place one of the new drives as master on the primary ide cable and
the second as slave (That's my current configuration).. or should I put one
harddrive as master and one burner as slave on the primary and again the same
setup on the secondary ide channel?
I have seen arguments for both.
2) Should I leave the page file on C or make a 4 GB,Fat 32 partition on the
second harddrive as the page file ?
Once again I have found varying oppinions.
3) I'm not sure but I dont know if it's a good idea to leave the C drive at
a 100 GB's but I'm not sure of the best overall partitioning sizes.
4) I'm thinking of making seperate partitions on the second harddrive for
pictures/downloads/video's/data/music but once again don't know the best
sollution.
I'm going to try and transfer old C to new C with the new drives included
software. If it don't work I'll just wipe and reinstall everything but on a
dial up network I really don't want to do this.
The computer is running XP home with 2 accounts, mine and my wifes. We use
it mainly for home schooling our 5 year old daughter and E-mail. I use it
mainly for trying to teach myself about computers and have basically rebuilt
it from the ground up except for the processor. We do a little bit with
pictures and making videos. It is a 5 year old Dimmension 4400, 1.7 Ghz. P/4,
ATI Radeon 7000 64 Mb video card, sound blaster audigy MP3+ card, 1GB of ram,
I have added usb 2, midi and firewire ports. At present, we can't afford a
new machine and this one is more than adequate for our needs.....except for
the dial up network.
Thank you for any and all responses.
D.B.
 
D.B. said:
Four weeks ago, my computer went stupid on me.
My daughter was playing her educational game and it started rebooting. I did
all of the requisite spyware/adware,virus scans ad-nauseaum. Finally, I did a
repair install of XP and I thought it solved the problem but noticed other
strange goings on such as all of my drive letters have changed and I started
getting disk errors.
I ran chkdsk and it found some problems on my H drive.
( c drive is my original 20 GB system drive, D drive is one of my DVD
burners , E drive is the other DVD burner. F,G and H are three seperate,equal
partitions on a 120 GB harddrive).
Dskchk locked up at 54% of phase 5 on H drive requiring a hard shutdown. I
left it run for hours with no change.
I have since bought 2 new 100 Gb hard drives and want to replace both the 20
and 120 Gb drives with these.
I have read just about everything I could find on the most efficient
partitioning scheme's and discovered there is no clear concensus.
I want to do this right the first time so:
1) Do I place one of the new drives as master on the primary ide cable and
the second as slave (That's my current configuration).. or should I put one
harddrive as master and one burner as slave on the primary and again the same
setup on the secondary ide channel?
I have seen arguments for both.
2) Should I leave the page file on C or make a 4 GB,Fat 32 partition on the
second harddrive as the page file ?
Once again I have found varying oppinions.
3) I'm not sure but I dont know if it's a good idea to leave the C drive at
a 100 GB's but I'm not sure of the best overall partitioning sizes.
4) I'm thinking of making seperate partitions on the second harddrive for
pictures/downloads/video's/data/music but once again don't know the best
sollution.
I'm going to try and transfer old C to new C with the new drives included
software. If it don't work I'll just wipe and reinstall everything but on a
dial up network I really don't want to do this.
The computer is running XP home with 2 accounts, mine and my wifes. We use
it mainly for home schooling our 5 year old daughter and E-mail. I use it
mainly for trying to teach myself about computers and have basically rebuilt
it from the ground up except for the processor. We do a little bit with
pictures and making videos. It is a 5 year old Dimmension 4400, 1.7 Ghz. P/4,
ATI Radeon 7000 64 Mb video card, sound blaster audigy MP3+ card, 1GB of ram,
I have added usb 2, midi and firewire ports. At present, we can't afford a
new machine and this one is more than adequate for our needs.....except for
the dial up network.
Thank you for any and all responses.
D.B.
Click to expand...

Changing Drive Letters in Windows XP
http://www.mvps.org/marksxp/WindowsXP/driveltr.php
Graphic detailed instructions at above link.
 
D.B. said:
Four weeks ago, my computer went stupid on me.
My daughter was playing her educational game and it started rebooting. I did
all of the requisite spyware/adware,virus scans ad-nauseaum. Finally, I did a
repair install of XP and I thought it solved the problem but noticed other
strange goings on such as all of my drive letters have changed and I started
getting disk errors.
I ran chkdsk and it found some problems on my H drive.
( c drive is my original 20 GB system drive, D drive is one of my DVD
burners , E drive is the other DVD burner. F,G and H are three seperate,equal
partitions on a 120 GB harddrive).
Dskchk locked up at 54% of phase 5 on H drive requiring a hard shutdown. I
left it run for hours with no change.
I have since bought 2 new 100 Gb hard drives and want to replace both the 20
and 120 Gb drives with these.
I have read just about everything I could find on the most efficient
partitioning scheme's and discovered there is no clear concensus.
I want to do this right the first time so:
1) Do I place one of the new drives as master on the primary ide cable and
the second as slave (That's my current configuration).. or should I put one
harddrive as master and one burner as slave on the primary and again the same
setup on the secondary ide channel?
I have seen arguments for both.
2) Should I leave the page file on C or make a 4 GB,Fat 32 partition on the
second harddrive as the page file ?
Once again I have found varying oppinions.
3) I'm not sure but I dont know if it's a good idea to leave the C drive at
a 100 GB's but I'm not sure of the best overall partitioning sizes.
4) I'm thinking of making seperate partitions on the second harddrive for
pictures/downloads/video's/data/music but once again don't know the best
sollution.
I'm going to try and transfer old C to new C with the new drives included
software. If it don't work I'll just wipe and reinstall everything but on a
dial up network I really don't want to do this.
The computer is running XP home with 2 accounts, mine and my wifes. We use
it mainly for home schooling our 5 year old daughter and E-mail. I use it
mainly for trying to teach myself about computers and have basically rebuilt
it from the ground up except for the processor. We do a little bit with
pictures and making videos. It is a 5 year old Dimmension 4400, 1.7 Ghz. P/4,
ATI Radeon 7000 64 Mb video card, sound blaster audigy MP3+ card, 1GB of ram,
I have added usb 2, midi and firewire ports. At present, we can't afford a
new machine and this one is more than adequate for our needs.....except for
the dial up network.
Thank you for any and all responses.
D.B.
Click to expand...

Before you do anything, DB. Look at this site, print out the "tut" and
save yourself a load of (potential) grief, friend. :-)
 
I've always stuck with the rule "Don't mix hard disks & optical drives on
the same IDE channel".
I always put the HDDs on IDE 0 and CD/DVD drives on IDE 1.
Moving the swap file to the slave drive will probably give you a small
performance boost
(or moving it to a different partition on the master will, I guess, negate
some fragmentation issues).
Can't tell you how big to make your partitions - depends on stuff like:
where you put the swap file
where you install your applications
if you move "My Documents" etc to another partition

but I'd definately recommend installing a copy of Partition Magic (or
similar)
so that you can adjust your partition sizes when you need to.

[I could be mistaken about any/all of the above ;)]
 
1. Master/slave configuration is fine.

2. Your PC doesn't meet a requirement for moving the swapfile to another
hard drive. The alternate hard drive is not any faster. You have no just
as fast or faster alternate bus system like scsi to operate such hard drive.

3. If the alternate hard drive is adequate for your purposes, the boot
drive should be partitioned entirely as one partition. Barring any factory
PC non-OS partitions of course for those reading and having this.

4. If you ever have to access the second hard drive in a non-XP
environment, FAT32 is best. If never anticipated, go with NTFS (type 3 used
by XP).

Assuming you have the room, I would image your current C: drive to F: or G:
as an image file(s). Using an imaging program that works in the XP
environment for ease of use. Remove the old C: hard drive. Swap in the new
master, assure the bios "sees" it. Boot off the imaging program's boot CD
and restore it to the new drive. Enlarge this partition at your own risk,
should be an option during the user restore option process. Or just clean
install XP if the Dell CD allows such.

Temporarily disconnect the DVDs. Leave the old drive slave. Make the
alternate new hard drive as master. Connect to the secondary ide connector.
Make NTFS or FAT32 partitions, you'll lose a little space with FAT32 while
in XP if made with XP. Copy the data from F: and G: to corresponding
partitions on the new alternate hard drive. Turn off the PC, and remove the
old hard drive and the new alternate hard drive. Place both DVD burners in
the original locations on the secondary ide's ribbon cable. Turn on PC, and
assure they have the same drive lettering. Turn off the PC. Attach the new
alternate hard drive as slave on the primary ide cable. If the drive
letters have changed after booting XP, configure them to the original
designations.

Western Digital hard drives have two master jumper configurations. 1.
Master alone 2. Master with slave. Be sure the master is always jumpered
correctly.
 
Thanks for the response Sandy.
After I discovered the drive letter weirdness I did change them back to the
way they belonged. But things were still acting strange. For instance, in the
past, when I would run chkdsk on any of the drives it would require a reboot
to run. After this weirdness it would run on the non-system drive without a
reboot. I put this drive in my self 3 or 4 years ago and it has always
required a reboot. I can't remember but at the time I may have set one of the
partitions up as a mounted volume and forgot about it.
Anyway, to try and figure this out I did some investigative work and
discovered a failing harddrive. I flashed my BIOS to the latest release and
thats when the S.M.A.R.T. sensors detected a failing harddrive. (Raw read
errors I believe).
Never the less, I do appreciate your response. Thanks
 
Hi Phil.
I too have always been of the assumption of keeping the harddrives on the
same channel and the slower, burners on their own,seperate channel but during
my research, I came across an article by one of the MVP's,)can't remember
which one), who advised the harddrive/burner on the primary and
harddrive/burner on the secondary channel scenereo. Something about both
harddrives being designated as master would facilitate faster read/write and
access times.
I will,as soon as finances allow,look into "Partition Magic" or it's
equivalent.
Thanks again for your response.
--
As always thanks for any and all responses.


Phil Sharpe said:
I've always stuck with the rule "Don't mix hard disks & optical drives on
the same IDE channel".
I always put the HDDs on IDE 0 and CD/DVD drives on IDE 1.
Moving the swap file to the slave drive will probably give you a small
performance boost
(or moving it to a different partition on the master will, I guess, negate
some fragmentation issues).
Can't tell you how big to make your partitions - depends on stuff like:
where you put the swap file
where you install your applications
if you move "My Documents" etc to another partition

but I'd definately recommend installing a copy of Partition Magic (or
similar)
so that you can adjust your partition sizes when you need to.

[I could be mistaken about any/all of the above ;)]

D.B. said:
Four weeks ago, my computer went stupid on me.
My daughter was playing her educational game and it started rebooting. I
did
all of the requisite spyware/adware,virus scans ad-nauseaum. Finally, I
did a
repair install of XP and I thought it solved the problem but noticed other
strange goings on such as all of my drive letters have changed and I
started
getting disk errors.
I ran chkdsk and it found some problems on my H drive.
( c drive is my original 20 GB system drive, D drive is one of my DVD
burners , E drive is the other DVD burner. F,G and H are three
seperate,equal
partitions on a 120 GB harddrive).
Dskchk locked up at 54% of phase 5 on H drive requiring a hard shutdown. I
left it run for hours with no change.
I have since bought 2 new 100 Gb hard drives and want to replace both the
20
and 120 Gb drives with these.
I have read just about everything I could find on the most efficient
partitioning scheme's and discovered there is no clear concensus.
I want to do this right the first time so:
1) Do I place one of the new drives as master on the primary ide cable and
the second as slave (That's my current configuration).. or should I put
one
harddrive as master and one burner as slave on the primary and again the
same
setup on the secondary ide channel?
I have seen arguments for both.
2) Should I leave the page file on C or make a 4 GB,Fat 32 partition on
the
second harddrive as the page file ?
Once again I have found varying oppinions.
3) I'm not sure but I dont know if it's a good idea to leave the C drive
at
a 100 GB's but I'm not sure of the best overall partitioning sizes.
4) I'm thinking of making seperate partitions on the second harddrive for
pictures/downloads/video's/data/music but once again don't know the best
sollution.
I'm going to try and transfer old C to new C with the new drives included
software. If it don't work I'll just wipe and reinstall everything but on
a
dial up network I really don't want to do this.
The computer is running XP home with 2 accounts, mine and my wifes. We use
it mainly for home schooling our 5 year old daughter and E-mail. I use it
mainly for trying to teach myself about computers and have basically
rebuilt
it from the ground up except for the processor. We do a little bit with
pictures and making videos. It is a 5 year old Dimmension 4400, 1.7 Ghz.
P/4,
ATI Radeon 7000 64 Mb video card, sound blaster audigy MP3+ card, 1GB of
ram,
I have added usb 2, midi and firewire ports. At present, we can't afford a
new machine and this one is more than adequate for our needs.....except
for
the dial up network.
Thank you for any and all responses.
D.B.
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
Thanks Johnny.
I have printed out your recommendations for further review.
I believe when I put the second harddrive in, about 3 or 4 years ago, that I
assured both were set up as "cable select" and as a matter of fact are both
Western Digital drives.
As far as the page file on a seperate drive goes, I experimented a few years
ago while trying to learn various tweaks and in fact did put the swap file on
the other disk, but as you point out, I don't have a SCSI set up and
therefore noticed no apparent speed or performance increase. I tried several
tweaks like disabling the executive paging and the like but ultimately put
things back as they were because, once again, noticed no performance
increase. The best thing I ever did was replace the stock 128 Mb of ram with
two 512 sticks. What a difference !
I guess you can only do so much with a 1.7 Ghz. processor and can only
upgrade to a 2.8 and thats still with only 500 FSB.(Mother board wont accept
800 mhz.fsb).
Perhaps, if we eventually get a new box I'll keep this one to experiment more.
I'll put the bigger/faster processor in and upgrade the video to the largest
I can get,(256 mb. but still only agp 4 as thats all I can take). Oh well,
only way to learn is by doing.
Thanks again for your response.
 
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