Setting Up a Partition for a brand new Comp

Hi All,

Just finished building a new comp and I'm having some difficulty with particioning my 500 gig HD.

I created a new partition for the OS alone (which is windows XP SP2) -- it's 4.5 gigs.

I installed the OS to that partition -- loaded all my drivers and everything seems to be working fine.

I then go to look at my hard drive capacity and it says that there is only 4.5 gigs of storage available. I recognized that I needed to format the other part of the hard drive (450 or so gigs).

I did, but the PC is asking me to label the partition as a completely seperate drive (E).

I'm hoping the FIPG community might be able to make some suggestions to me for partitioning this drive as best as possible (Size of OS partition, FAT vs NTFS).

Any suggestions or strategies that people can suggest?

Thanks,

Dig

You created a 4.5GB partition, so that's all the space you can have on that partition. Creating a new partition from the remaining space will result in a different drive letter -- you can't have C drive pointing at more than one partition (without dynamic disk support anyway, which you probably don't want and is beyond the scope of non-techies).

You should aways use NTFS -- never FAT32, unless you're dual-booting Linux or a pre-NT version of Windows and need to share data on the partition.

Personally, I always partition Windows by itself on C drive, but 4.5GB is not enough -- a full install of XP + pagefile will fill that, with no room for drivers and other systems files down the road. You could put the pagefile on another partition, but you're still too full. I recommend a minimum 10GB partition for Windows, to give it more breathing room. Then I partition the rest as a D partition where all apps & data go. Then, when I'm reformatting/reinstalling Windows 2 or 3 times a year like I always do, I don't have to back anything up -- just wipe C drive and re-install Windows. Been following this partitioning scheme for years and I wouldn't think of going back to an all-inclusive C partition.

I never understand why people put the OS on one partition and the data on another, If both partitions are on the same disk drive this will not improve performance, it could however potentially decrease performance by increasing seek times. Anyway, if you are really stuck on doing things the way you have it now I will tell you how to add the new partition into your windows pc.

Go to control panel>

Switch to classic view if you have not already>

open administrative tools>

open computer management>

open storage>

open disk management>

if you scroll down the list of available disks, you should come upon the 450 so odd gigs of unallocated space. Give it a right click and click partition. You want it to be set as a primary partition and do it in NTFS (why on earth would you do fat32 anymore). Oh and doing quick format is fine, it will save you TONS of time and only skips the disk verification which is not an issue on a new drive. There you go. Check out your My Computer and you will see a new 450Gb partition ready to use.

[quote7a99eb9182="JOSHBOX"]I never understand why people put the OS on one partition and the data on another, If both partitions are on the same disk drive this will not improve performance, it could however potentially decrease performance by increasing seek times. [/quote7a99eb9182]
There are a few reasons, the primary one I touched upon in my reply. I've been doing it for years and would NEVER go back to a monolithic partition. I reinstall Windows several times per year, and it's a must unless you like to backup & restore several hundred gigs everytime you do so.

I compare it to Unix/Linux partitioning, where it has always been customary (long before the days of Windows or even DOS) to break up your HD into partitions for various OS and data components. The added flexibility when performing system upkeep is worth many times more than mere performance, which in all honestly is not impacted to any noticeable degree with typical usage.

As far as NTFS vs. FAT32, I also pointed out a reason for staying with FAT32, although I don't see it applying to this case.

[quote64c4594554="JOSHBOX"]I never understand why people put the OS on one partition and the data on another, If both partitions are on the same disk drive this will not improve performance, it could however potentially decrease performance by increasing seek times. Anyway, if you are really stuck on doing things the way you have it now I will tell you how to add the new partition into your windows pc.

[/quote64c4594554]

I have my OS on a separate partition because it is a huge help with formatting. I reformat quite often and with the OS on a separate partition I dont' have to backup and then restore all my files.

Also it's, I can't even find a word for it, but super amazing if you have a ton of pics that you were too lazy to back up or lost the backups to and then for some reason something bad happens and you have to reformat. The chances of data being saved area much much higher

oh and Dmorris68 is a smart guy listen to what he is saying.

You can't have two parts of a partition using the same drive letter.
Same thing would happen if you wanted to partition the rest of the drive into two partitions. It would be E and F (depending on your setup).