Partitioning suggestions

[lorenzodv]

I have a Athlon TB 800 MHz PC with 384 MB RAM.

Recently I bought a 40 GB hard drive and plan to install it with Windows XP installed.
Since the HD is very big, I want to partition it the smart way. Could you give me some tips? How many partitions? How much large? For what use and using which file system (FAT32, NTFS)?

Thanks very much.

 

[dilettante]

Here's my 2 cents...

System partition for OS and most software (Program Files, et al.)... 10GB

Work partition for work files, documents, MP3s, images, big stuff like MSDN Library if you use it... 20GB

Archive partition for stuff you know you want to make a long-term backup of, but seldom get around to right away... 10GB

Put vitual memory swap disk anyplace - all one drive anyhow so there's little advantage in moving it from the system partition anyhow.

Archive should always have room for putting any big stuff you need for "just a little while" and if you need close to 10GB temporarily - well it should all be "to be archived" so you start buring CD-Rs and then wipe it.

All NTFS - little reason to do otherwise.

Video editing: get a second drive.

All right everybody, tell me where I've gone wrong here ;-)

 

[dilettante]

Here's my 2 cents...

System partition for OS and most software (Program Files, et al.)... 10GB

Work partition for work files, documents, MP3s, images, big stuff like MSDN Library if you use it... 20GB

Archive partition for stuff you know you want to make a long-term backup of, but seldom get around to right away... 10GB

Put vitual memory swap disk anyplace - all one drive anyhow so there's little advantage in moving it from the system partition anyhow.

Archive should always have room for putting any big stuff you need for "just a little while" and if you need close to 10GB temporarily - well it should all be "to be archived" so you start burning CD-Rs and then wipe it.

All NTFS - little reason to do otherwise.

Video editing: get a second drive.

All right everybody, tell me where I've gone wrong here ;-)

 

[Disgruntled]

I have a similar set up partitioned 4 x 10.

One partition is FAT32.
The reason is Dos utilities like ghost don't recognise NTFS file structures.

These are essentil if you use XP which is very flacky (see thread 616-86626 c000218 errors on 2k & XP) About 30 A4 pages of pathological problems on cold booting.

You can then ghost a crompressed image to a Fat32 file and recover after a c0000218 in a few minutes instead of hours.

I am suspicious the C0000218 is something to do with NTFS as it often also corrupts NTFS.SYS.
Others claim there is no connection.

I am going to moove my systems partition to Fat32 just in case

 

[dilettante]

Hmm.

That's a thought, but Windows XP has been even more stable than Windows 2000 for me. Are you sure you are running a supported machine configuration?

 

[lorenzodv]

Another thing I wonder is the following: I heard Windowx 2000/XP reserves drive letters, so they do not change dynamically whenn adding/removing partitions. Is there the possibilities to change them as well?

 

[malepipe]

I PERSONALLY would make 2.
One O/S and one everything else.If you need real backup get another drive or backup to CDRW as just a partition isn't gaining you much.
NFTS is a pain in the heiny,go with FAT32.
my .02
Jimi_l(AKA Malepipe)

 

[Mijjoiji]

I just made a ghost of my XP and it worked perfectly, even though I´ve got NTFS. (I was using Norton Ghost 2002)

Best Regards!
/Jim

 

[Disgruntled]

Dilletante,
I have moved my system to FAT32 but still get the C0000218 message after a number of sucessful cold boots.
I agree XP is stable and doesn't crash but C000218 is a shut down issue.

There is nothing unusual about the hardware.

There are literally hundreds of posts about this issue in the W2k thread.

Every one seems to agree that it is how 2k/xp shuts down.
The most likely theory is the disc has accepted the hive file write command but not finished it before being powered down.
Thus if you are better to have old discs or a slow board no problems.
I have a modern K266A board and 7200 rpm IBM IDE.
I cannot turn cache off on the disc as it is Raid controlled from the board. Anyhow this will neuter the system.

 

[lorenzodv]

Ehm, could we return to the original topic...?
I had asked what is the smart way to destiny partitions on a 40GB HD and if it is possible, in WinXP, to change drive letters by hand.

 

[dilettante]

lorenzodv,

Under WinXP changing drive letter assignments is easy, just run Computer Management under Administrative Tools and open the Disk Management snap-in.

In Disk Management just right-click on the drive (fixed drive, or CD-ROM drive, etc.) and select "Change drive letter and Paths" ... and follow the easy dialog that brings up.

Disgruntled,

Have you tried looking at the power management settings you have selected at the BIOS level? Many Win2K and WinXP shutdown problems stem from settings that are incompatible with NT 5.x

Another problem that seems related is shutdown failures due to legacy USB devices. I have a QuickCam VC that works fine in both 2K and XP, but if I don't "shut down" this device via the tray applet before telling Windows to shut down I either get a blue screen (in Win2K - only one I've ever seen) or a really messy lockup (WinXP).

I don't call this a Windows problem because the device isn't officially supported in either OS, so I'm glad I got it to work at all and I understand the need for my manual shutdown - the drivers are too old to handle the Windows shutdown message sent to the device.

malepipe,

I agree with your 2 partition recommendation, and in fact do it myself just as you suggest. Still, that extra 10GB partition (a 3rd one) can be useful. Not as a backup, but as a staging area for stuff I need to back up. And as a "clean" partition after I DO my backups - somewhere to dump stuff to mess with temporarily.

But as I said, I only use 2 myself right now.

No idea what you have against NTFS, it is very robust. The only use I can imagine to use FAT32 is to waste space on disk, slacken security in general, and allow for the really odd occasion when you want to boot a DOS floppy and see your HD contents. Even then the partitions are probably too big for DOS to handle anyway. Just use NTFS-DOS or whatever that thing is called if you need that.

 

[lorenzodv]

I agree with dilettante about NTFS: 512 byte clusters and indexed file table are surely good.

I was thinking about making a partition for Win & Programs, one for documents/stuff/downloads/data, one for games and maybe an archive partition.

I'm going to separate games because they are usually large and get installed/uninstalled all the time.

I wonder 2 things at the moment:
- is it good to put documents on the second drive (that is slower)?
- is it convenient to make a swap/temporary partition with 384 MB RAM? if it is, how much large and using wich file system?

Thanks to all of you.

 

[Disgruntled]

I partition into 5 on a 40g drive.
Partition one about 3.5 gig for the O/S
Partition 2 about 6 gig for Program.files.
Partition 3 about 10g for data.
Partition 4 about 10 g for ghosts of O/S
Partition 5 spare.

I reason that keeping the O/S partition small is a good defense against problems. One can then ghost an image back in if all goers wrong. The restore in windies does not let one get back from a full failure.
Keeping program files in a sepearate partition ensures the O/s partition doesn't bloat too much.
Obviously you need to reinstall apps if something goes wrong with this but this is just time. One can also ghost the apps partition once no additions are envisaged.

As regards my power management this is not the cause according to otheres. I don't use standby but this is obviously a solution as the O/s doesn't shut right down.
I prefer to re-boot occassionally due to inevitable memory leakage even if the o/s is stable.

 

[MinnisotaFreezing]

A little off topic, but I hear a lot of people talking about ghosts and archives. Has anyone ever lost a whole drive? In 5 years, I have never lost a drive, so I am wondering if it is totally neciasarry. I back up critical data, but not the OS or a whole drive. Is that going to bite me in the but someday?

 

[AlexIT]

MinnisotaFreezing,

I have 30+ Dell systems (more at home too), I have lost total 3 HD in 7+yrs. Failures do happen ocassionally. In two cases I was able to recover data from secondary partitions (non-boot) by installing into another machine and setting the drive as a slave. In the third case the drive had nothing but bad sectors end to end and all was gone.

Alex

 

[malepipe]

At work they(the IT guys) have reported several total losses.In an office of about 25 PC's they report about 8-10 sudden and total losses in 8 yrs.Certain drives trend to be more suseptable than others.Western Digital and Maxtor being the best,IBM and Seagate being the worst.
This is THEIR opinion, not mine.
Jimi_l(AKA Malepipe)

 

[lorenzodv]

Dilettante, this message is for you.
You said me:
> Put vitual memory swap disk anyplace - all one drive
> anyhow so there's little advantage in moving it from
> the system partition anyhow.

I heard it is better to have the swap file allocated at the beginning of the drive. So, since I'm moving it from the primary system partition, have I to place it on a second drive (I have it, but not as new as the 40GB drive)? I would like to make this partition Hidden (with partition magic) and assign it a drive letter such as M: or T:.
My doubts are:
- what type the partition has to be (primary/logical)?
- if it is logical, am I allowed to put extended partitions at the beginning of the drive?
- what file system is more indicated (since it is going to be small, maybe NTFS will cause too much overhead...)?
- how large with 324 MB RAM already?
- may I move the C:\Windows\Temp dir there too?

Sorry for the bunch of questions
Hope you can help me.

 

[malepipe]

IMHO
Messing with the swap file is quite possibly THE single biggest waste of time there is. This is SOOOOOO overrated and all the machines I have ever tried it on see no improvement at all.I realize this is a debateable point but I have yet to read a single article, or see a single benchmark, that shows it of any value.Nor have I ever mat or talked to a single person that reports any increase of performance worth noting.Crashes and slowdowns yes-faster,NO.
Let windows handle it and dont worth messing somthing up.
Here is one of many articles that confirms this.

http://www.aumha.org/a/memmgmtz.htm

Jimi_l

 

[Disgruntled]

THe point about ghosting is that XP shut down/loading is flacky not the disk harware.
A full reinstall takes at least 40 minutes a ghost 6.

The connection to partitions is you need one Fat32 to ghost images. NTFS is not recognised by DOS so the utility doesn't see files just partitions.

 

[lorenzodv]

malepipe, you can be right that it is not a good idea to move the swap file to a unit other than C:, but you can't be against fixed-size, wich has benne proven to increase performance and to reduce fragmentation.