Partitions

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Guest

Hi Group,
My old machine has two 8Gb drives without partitions.

My new machine (due to arrive this week) is expected to have two 80Gb
drives.

Can any advise on
1. the need for partitions,
2. any rule of thumb as to the setting of partitions and
3. of any recommended third party partition software that might help me if I
need to partition.

Thanks in advance to all those that take the time to reply.

David
 
dNOfSPAMn said:
My old machine has two 8Gb drives without partitions.

My new machine (due to arrive this week) is expected to have two 80Gb
drives.

Can any advise on
1. the need for partitions,
2. any rule of thumb as to the setting of partitions and
3. of any recommended third party partition software that might help
me if I need to partition.

Thanks in advance to all those that take the time to reply.
Click to expand...

1. The need for partitions depends greatly on YOUR needs. With Windows XP,
the seperate hard drives (physical) will be of more help (except for
organizational/personal preference purposes) than seperate partitions. I
personaly see no need for seperate partitions, but heavily believe in the
value of seperate hard drives. For example, 3 of my machines have a
configuration where a 20-40GB hard drive is my boot/application/system drive
and a RAID array (IDE) between 160GB and 1TB is my second "drive". This way
if my OS goes downhill, I just re-install. Trouble, yes - but all my data
is COMPLETELY (hardware-wise) seperate from my OS - which is the part that
can go.. "wicki".

2. If you insist on partitioning.. Leave as much free space on your boot
partition(system) as you can. I personally would leave make it a 20GB
partition at least - for future purposes. I have seen too many cases where
someone says "4GB is large enough of a partition for my OS/stuff and then
all my data on another drive.." then the newest OS comes out and they cannot
upgrade without formatting.

3. This is where I recommend a google/Google groups search. Everyone will
recommend something they found/tried/liked - up to you to read through it
and decide.

This brings up another interesting corollary.. If you consider yourself
pretty "computer savvy" and you know your way around the system pretty well,
backup regularly or if you plan on using this system for multiple users and
would like to protect some spots from certain users - then go with NTFS
formatting. If you aren't as "computer savvy" and don't backup regularly
and want to be able to get to your data using a Win98 Boot disk if things go
awry - then stick with FAT32 - but to format any drive over 32GB for FAT32,
you cannot use Windows XP to do it - you will have to find one of those
third party utilities you asked about.
 
dNOfSPAMn said:
My old machine has two 8Gb drives without partitions.

My new machine (due to arrive this week) is expected to have two 80Gb
drives.

Can any advise on
1. the need for partitions,
2. any rule of thumb as to the setting of partitions and
3. of any recommended third party partition software that might help me if I
need to partition.
Click to expand...

David,

you already got very good advice. Let me just add that I also
think you should have just one partition on each hard disk,
unless you have a clear and good reason for more.

By the way, if you don't need all the disk space, you could
mirror the two hard disks for more safety or use one as a backup
for the other.

Hans-Georg
 
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