"Partitioning" question

When you wipe a drive clean and begin installing a fresh OS system, one of the first options I always see concerns Partioning drives, can anyone explain this to me please? I don't understand why you would have to do this and why you would choose any of the options given? Thanks.

 

Even with a clean drive Windows still has to partition and format. That is the first option because you have to create and activate a partition for install.

 

For what purpose would you want an "extended" partition?

 

you can add more partitions for things like dual booting operating systems, creating different logical drives for seperate types of applications and data, and many other things.

i use a small partition just for windows and i keep all my installed software on a second logical drive. this way if my os install get's fubar'd i haven't lost all of my installs and personal data.

sometimes people like to make a partition near the outer edge of the hdd platters just for the pagefile. the outside of the platters spins faster than the inside so theortically you get better performance when the pagefile is in use.

with todays hdd's getting so large you almost need to partition up that space somehow to make things manageable. in the past as hdd's outpaced the os you were forced to partion simply because the os was unable to address a drive past a certain size.

there's plenty more reasons to partition as well, this just skims the surface.

 

I love this idea, can you instruct me on how to this please or can you give a link to any tutorial that explains how to do this? Thanks.

 

it's really very simple. when you install a fresh copy of windows, when it gets to the part where it asks which drive to install to simply chose the physical drive you want and make sure you tell it to partition the drive so that you have a smaller (10-20GB) partition just for xp. the first time i did it i chose 10gb, which really was enough, but i did run into some problems from time to time when trying to defrag, you need a certain amounbt of free space in order to get a good defrag, and with the 10gb partition there wasn't always enough.

i would recommend at least 15gb, and maybe 20 if you decide to leave your page file on the c: drive.

now when you get xp installed i don't remember if the rest of the space was already partitioned and formatted for you or not (had the same install for quite some time now). if it is not partitioned and formatted already you can do this yourself easily in computer management. simply select the unpartition space, and chose to formatt it to ntfs and chose the drive letter you'd like to use for it.

from there on all you have to remember to do is to change the drive letter to the other partiton whenever you install new software. i generally only change the drive letter on the install path, keeps things easier IMHO.

it's not a terribly hard process, but it definately makes things a bit easier down the road.

stuff like video, sound and mobo drivers i usually install to c:, if the os goes down i'll need to reinstall those anyways so it's not a big deal. everything else goes off to my F: drive.

 

ok, thanks, will be reinstalling windows soon and will report back here to tell how it goes and or ask any other questions if I should run into trouble, stay tuned please.

 

will do, good luck

 

Couldn't try out the partitioning here unfortunately because my cousin's HD which I am working on is only 20GB so you instructions helped already [thanks]. I will be getting a 160GB additonal HD for "my" pc next week and so will be asking a lot of questions here in an effort to make the best use of the 2 drives I will be using in my pc.

 

i assume you got it working?

 

Yeah, installed easily but I did not have to do any special partitioning, used the new HD as a slave and store all of my mp3's and video files in there, thanks for asking and sorry I forgot to mention this here.