Windows 8 Partition

[adumthing]

Hi i just built a gaming rig yesterday and all i need to do now is install windows 8. I have seen tutorials on the net about how to do it and it all looks pretty straight forward and easy except for the partition. I don't really understand what a partition is and how i should do it. Can someone explain what i should do when installing windows 8? I have a 2tb hard drive if that helps.
Thanks

 

[USAFRet]

Hi i just built a gaming rig yesterday and all i need to do now is install windows 8. I have seen tutorials on the net about how to do it and it all looks pretty straight forward and easy except for the partition. I don't really understand what a partition is and how i should do it. Can someone explain what i should do when installing windows 8? I have a 2tb hard drive if that helps.
Thanks

You don't need to partition anything. Boot from the DVD, install. Let Windows do its thing.

 

[adumthing]

Hi i just built a gaming rig yesterday and all i need to do now is install windows 8. I have seen tutorials on the net about how to do it and it all looks pretty straight forward and easy except for the partition. I don't really understand what a partition is and how i should do it. Can someone explain what i should do when installing windows 8? I have a 2tb hard drive if that helps.
Thanks

You don't need to partition anything. Boot from the DVD, install. Let Windows do its thing.

Really? That's easy, how come on all the tutorials and videos i've found have people making partitions?

 

[avjguy2362]

If you just want to install Windows 8 and have one 2 TB Drive, usually the "C" drive then you have one partition. There is a hidden 100MB boot partition, but you won't see it or need to do anything with it. It is automatically installed and hidden to the user. However, you may very well want to partition your 2 TB drive just to make things more organized. If I were doing this, I would set up a 100 GB partition for my OS and all my primary programs, but not games. Then I would partition another 500 GB for games, 200GB for pictures, 400 Gb for Movies, 100 GB for general personal files and 200 GB for music. Each of these partitions would have it's own drive letter ( they do not have to be in order! ) I would leave the remaining amount un-formatted until needed.
If you want to do this ahead of time put the drive in another computer or an external enclosure and go to DIsk Manager. Go to the Drive and right click on the rectangle that represents the drive and choose format. Follow the instructions. WHen it asks how big you want it, choose an amount smaller than the total to create that partition size. You will be asked what partition letter you want too! If you screw it up a bit, you can delete partitions or volumes and do it over again. Then take it out and install it into your computer and put the disk in and install Windows 8 on the first partition! IF you don't want to partition, you don't need to do anything. THe windows disk will format the 2TB disk for you and install the OS all at once!

 

[adumthing]

If you just want to install Windows 8 and have one 2 TB Drive, usually the "C" drive then you have one partition. There is a hidden 100MB boot partition, but you won't see it or need to do anything with it. It is automatically installed and hidden to the user. However, you may very well want to partition your 2 TB drive just to make things more organized. If I were doing this, I would set up a 100 GB partition for my OS and all my primary programs, but not games. Then I would partition another 500 GB for games, 200GB for pictures, 400 Gb for Movies, 100 GB for general personal files and 200 GB for music. Each of these partitions would have it's own drive letter ( they do not have to be in order! ) I would leave the remaining amount un-formatted until needed.
If you want to do this ahead of time put the drive in another computer or an external enclosure and go to DIsk Manager. Go to the Drive and right click on the rectangle that represents the drive and choose format. Follow the instructions. WHen it asks how big you want it, choose an amount smaller than the total to create that partition size. You will be asked what partition letter you want too! If you screw it up a bit, you can delete partitions or volumes and do it over again. Then take it out and install it into your computer and put the disk in and install Windows 8 on the first partition! IF you don't want to partition, you don't need to do anything. THe windows disk will format the 2TB disk for you and install the OS all at once!

Oh ok so partitioning is pretty much just creating a new fake hard drive, kinda like tricking your pc into thinking it has lots of little hard drives. Do i need to do this? I am not worried about being organized or anything so should i just leave it as one 2tb hard drive?

 

[USAFRet]

Partitioning used to be really useful, when drives were expensive.

The OS on one partition, data on others. If you ever need to reinstall the OS, only that partition is affected. But if the drive dies...all of those partitions are gone.
With hard drive space being so cheap these days, it is better to have them on different physical drives.

I have a SSD for the OS and applications. Another SSD for working data. An HDD for photography stuff, and another HDD that mainly contains backups. And critical data is also backed up on another drive on another PC.

My main system is 5.25TB....no partitions. Just individual drives.

 

[adumthing]

Ok thanks guys, i don't think i'll partition anything, i'll just leave it as one hard drive and get to gaming

 

[USAFRet]

Ok thanks guys, i don't think i'll partition anything, i'll just leave it as one hard drive and get to gaming

Until you want to migrate all that to an SDD.....