Advice wanted on partioning harddrive?
Thanks again guys x
Answers:
you don't "have to" partition a hard drive, (unless the full size isn't supported by the motherboard or operating system) some people like to partiction it for organizational purposes. I wouldn't partition an 80 gig running windows XP
at this point its not worth it for you to download some 3rd party app like partition magic pro and do this. When installing the os its always a good idea to make 3 partitions, 1 about 30-40 gb in size for the os and all installed programs, second about 3-5 gb to use as your virtual memory partition (don't want ur vram mixed with fragmented data files) and the third partition as large as you can , set my documents to this partition ect to help keep the user data separate from the operating system data.
There is no real reason to partition a single large hard drive. It offers no performance or reliability enhancements. Having one large partition is fine.
For the typical user partitioning a hard drive is not a requirement unless you have the following circumstances that might require it.
1. Lots of small files (<512KB) that will be placed on the drive as a result which will take a lot more space very quickly due to a cluster can only contain either a full amount of data or part from a file, not both. (See reducing cluster size via search engine)
2. Dual Booting multiple operating systems and ensuring each has it's own space to play with.
3. Making a dedicated partition for your swap file (Mainly for unix/linux but some windows admin's perfer a separate swap partition to reduce drive trashing (also a second hard drive for that which would be better).
4. Data Sorting to avoid folder level sorts.
If you fall into any of the categories you might be a candidate for repartitioning but usually you should be fine without it.
theres no real reason to partition your hard drive,its only done by manufacturers sometimes to make the p.c look like its got more hard drive space
i used to partition my drive into 4 partitions but now(as i use a system recovery disk),i just leave it as one local disk
alot of other p.c users are leaving their drives as one partition and then add a external drive,this way you still have a extra drive but theres no messing around with the windows os
its not worth it ,so leave it as it is
good luck!
well ..i hope u hve got lot of information from above guys...but ive to tell u one advantage of partitioning.tht if at all ur hardrive crashe u wont loose all data as u can make two partitions [20GB and 60GB]and save data onto 60gb partion////so if at all ur OS crashes u can format the entire hardrive and still retain ur data...
Strongly recommend picking up a copy of partition magic. Go to software sites where you can get the Powerquest version of the program for only a few dollars. One reason to partition the hard drive is so that you can confine the Operating System to one partition and if you save this partition through any one of several image programs, (I use PowerQuest drive image 2002 but there are others out there at reasonable cost) once you have a smoothly operating system you can save it to an image that is easy to restore quickly when your current OS goes to lunch. The secret is to keep the OS partition relatively small so the image will also not be too big and it will be easy to store several images. In addition by using a utility like Partition magic you can do all this after the Operating system has been installed. Also there are other nasty things that can happen like getting your partition hidden inadvertently. PQ makes it easy to recover from this situation.
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