Partitions?

[phand]

I have just purchased my first PC for grad school. Been using Macs at home
and WIndows at work for years. Have XP home preinstalled on a 40 gig HD. Is
it worthwhile going back and partitioning the HD? Would I have to back up
everything and reinstall? Pros and cons anyone?

 

[PhiL M.]

The traditional method is to destroy the existing partition and create
new partitions, following by formatting the drive to the appropriate
file system (XP supports NTFS and FAT/FAT32), then reinstall everything.
You do lose everything this way. Partition Magic (now a Symantec
product) can repartition your drive without destroying the existing
partition.
http://www.symantec.com/partitionmagic/

I like to keep my data on a separate partition - can reformat main
partition without losing data. But if the hard drive fails, then I
still lose everything, so it works to also backup data to something
"safer" first, like a CD.



|I have just purchased my first PC for grad school. Been using Macs at
home
| and WIndows at work for years. Have XP home preinstalled on a 40 gig
HD. Is
| it worthwhile going back and partitioning the HD? Would I have to back
up
| everything and reinstall? Pros and cons anyone?
|
|

 

[Jerry]

Not if you use Partition Magic

 

[Plato]

I have just purchased my first PC for grad school. Been using Macs at home
and WIndows at work for years. Have XP home preinstalled on a 40 gig HD. Is
it worthwhile going back and partitioning the HD?

No.

 

[Frank]

One can buy another hard drive cheaper then partition magic.