Archived from groups: microsoft.public.windowsxp.newusers (
More info?)
Thanx for the quick answers.
Very helpful.
"Vanguardx" wrote:
> "TheBFG" <TheBFG@discussions.microsoft.com>
> wrote in news:2D2F89F4-BCD8-420D-A309-69974E269426@microsoft.com:
> > My computer has the disk divided into 2 partitions from when I bought
> > it. This was done by the manufacturer Sony. So I have a 60GB disk
> > partitioned into 14 GB for the C drive and the rest for the D drive
> > My son had just bought a computer but he has no partition on the disk.
> > He has a 40 GB disk.
> > We both use NTFS not FAT. on XP home
> > My question: Should my son partition his disk, especially as he has
> > installed a lot of games, or is it not really necessary?
> > If it is a good thing to do, what is the best tools to do this with
> > without having to format the disk again. I have googled about this
> > but I get conflicting information.
> > Thanks for the advice in advance
>
> The reasons for partitioning have waned due to the operating systems
> evolving to catch up with the ever increasing disk sizes. At one time,
> you were forced to partition because the OS wouldn't handle really big
> partitions. Today you don't need to partition but you might want to
> anyway. Partitioning lets you separate the type of files you will put
> into each. You could have one partition for the operating system and
> programs, another for games, another for your data, and a separate
> instance of other operating systems in other partitions (so you can
> multiboot and pick which operating system you want to use at that time).
>
> Personally, and because I am using only one operating system on my
> current home computer, I like to have 2 partitions: one for the
> operating system and applications, and another for my data. This way
> when I have to eventually do repairs or even do a [fresh] install of the
> operating system (and it WILL occur), I can do the OS repair or
> reinstall and/or reinstall the applications without worrying about my
> data. However, that does mean you need to move all your data over to
> the other partition. You can move your My Documents folder easily
> enough, but moving over your profile paths (for your account, the All
> Users and Default accounts, and all other accounts), and changing
> programs to store on the other partition, like for Outlook [Express],
> will take time and some digging into. When you reinstall the operating
> system or applications, you would then have to reconfigure them again to
> point at your data over on the other partition.
>
> Having separate partitions also lets you manage your backups. I save a
> drive image of my OS & app partition and only occasionally do logical
> backups of it. That's because it doesn't change much and many of the
> updates are automatic so a reinstall would be quick from an old drive
> image followed up automatic updates. I can then more often perform
> backups on my data partition to ensure my backups are up to date but
> without all the extraneous files intermixed with it from the OS & app
> partition. However, you can also usually configure your backups to list
> specific directories or files to include in a data-only backup but I
> really don't want to bother traversing all my paths to separate out my
> data from the OS and applications.
>
> So it is really a personal choice how you want to slice up your OS,
> applications, and data across multiple partitions or pile them
> altogether within one partition. This only discusses the use of basic
> drives in Windows. You can use dynamic drives to make one spanned
> volume that spans across multiple drives, much like RAID span array,
> where you can add more drives but they all become part of a single
> spanned volume. That way you can add more drives and to increase the
> storage capacity of a single drive letter but, as with software RAID, I
> suspect you cannot include the OS partition, and reliability of the
> spanned volume diminishes with each added drive in the same way it
> diminishes with striping in RAID 0 (if one drive dies then the whole
> stripe set or spanned volume dies, and the more drives you add the more
> likely one will die). There is no fault tolerance in spanned volumes or
> striped RAID 0 sets.
>
>
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