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Partitioning Strategies

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towaco

Technical User
Oct 22, 2002
4
US
Partitioning Strategies

I am dual booting Win98SE and WinXP with Win98SE the first partition (C) on Drive 1 and a small XP boot partition the last of 5 partitions also on Drive 1 and also FAT32. The XP NTFS partition (K) has the XP Operating System on it and is first of 5 partitions on Drive 2. (Using Boot Magic on Drive 1 to manage booting.)
The 80 GB drives were organized when only Win98 was running and I'm attempting to keep some of the original drive letters so that both OS's can share the data partitions that already exist and minimize changes to Win98.

As with Win98, I'd like to keep the XP OS, most Applications, Temp Internet File, the Swap file, Data, and Backup each in separate partitions. Data & Backup are on different physical drives. I'm not clear where and on which physical drive each of the other partitions should be.
To maximize speed by using both drives at once when possible, which partitions should be on the other drive (opposite their OS) - the Swap file, the Temp Internet Files, the Apps, the Data - and where on the drive, assuming the "outside" of the drive is fastest?
Should partitions that XP uses exclusively always be NTFS - Swap, Apps, Temp files?
[This is an 800 MHz PIII with 512 MB RAM.]

Finally, how does the drive's position on the IDE cable and the designation of Master or Slave effect hard drive speed?

 
You'll probably get a lot of opinions about this. Mine is that I doubt it will make much difference whatever way you do it. Making swap/pagefiles fixed size to stop fragmentation and putting them on different physical drive to operating sytem, programs and data (some would advise a dedicated primary partition for the pagefile - sounds like you're using primary & extended with logical drives in extended) may derive some benefit.
 
"Finally, how does the drive's position on the IDE cable and the designation of Master or Slave effect hard drive speed?"

it doesn't.

A+,N+,S+,L+,I+,CFOT,CCNT,ACSP,ISA CCST3

 
I guess you guys are saying there's not much worth tweaking here beyond moving the Swap/Paging file to another physical drive (and fixing it's size).
Ok -thanks for condidering my questions.
 
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