Once again, I feel compelled to add an addendum on to that comment: Partition Magic purports to do a lot, and oftentimes it does things just fine. No problems there. However, Partition Magic should not be considered a faster, easier, or better alternative than FDISK (If doing this in non-NTFS partitions). It simply cannot, and will not, do what FDISK can do with the same level of assurance and predictability that FDISK can do it. What’s worse, if PM falters in any of its routine (Which isn’t that hard to get it to do) you’re in far more trouble than had you initially done this all within FDISK.
PM is the fisher price of FDISK- It’s easy to navigate, it’s easy to visually see what you’re getting, and when it all works, it can do exactly what FDISK can do. But like things fisher price, it isn’t something you should run around admitting to everyone that you own- you spent a lot of money on something you didn’t need. And again, like Fisher Price, when that wheel eventually falls off, because it’s made like garbage, you’ll inevitably get yourself pretty scrapped up and bruised.
*- Personally motivated comment time over (Not that I’m the only one complaining about PM out there).
OK. So, what did you decide to do? Are you going the FDISK route to add some partitions?
If you are, quickly list what you’re proposing to do and, again, myself, or someone else, can give you a quick description on what to expect. None of it’s complicated, but in my opinion it isn’t anything you should walk into blind thinking it will explain it all, because it wont.
Quickly explain what you’re after and I’ll be happy to type out a quick overview.
Switching topics a bit-
Regarding why partitioning out disks is a good thing, Urban Ranger nailed it. You can save a heck of a lot of time chopping things up. Formatting an 80 Gig drive could easily take hours on just the verification and testing phase alone. Chopping that up makes things more manageable and easier to switch things around now, and more importantly, down the road in the future.
For instance, with that 80 Gig drive, if you broke things up into 4 – 20 Gig partitions, when it came time to reformat the OS partition, you’re talking a fraction of the time it’d normally take to do. On top of that, like others have said, it makes sense to have other partitions hold data.
In my system, what I previously had, and what I’m headed for this time, is essentially this- two partitions containing a different OS’s on each on the front. A partition after that holding all my downloaded programs, patches, and whatnot, along with any other nonsense I need to find a home for. Another partition after that containing only MP3’s and large file type data- pictures and stuff like that. Finally, I have a couple partitions set aside for backups. One is a backup of all the MP3’s (Those babies get serious protection because they’ve been lost before :: sniff:: ) and one was for registry backups and full system backups. That final partition is going to be changed now. Instead of having the registry and backup stuff, I’m simply going to ghost images of the OS’s at various times onto that partition. I’ve found, a couple times now, that full backups and registry backups are useless later unless you’re fairly close, in updated terms, to the last one. In my opinion, I might as well ghost the damn thing every week or so and have a fully functional, easy, place to go back to.
So what you’ve gained by partitioning things out are essentially little cells holding important data that, for the most part, are relatively immune to crashing or getting wiped out. You still run a possibility of it getting screwed up, but not nearly the chance that you do having everything on one partition. What’s more, when it finally comes time to reinstall an OS on one or more of the partitions you’re made, it’s a simple enough matter of picking out what you want kept from the old OS and moving it over to a secondary partition. In the process of reinstalling, whatever it is you’ve saved, is still safe and protected in it’s own little cell.
All in all it makes a lot of sense, and is something you should seriously consider, even if it doesn’t make much sense now, because down the road as you get used to it and understand it better, you’ll be happy you did it.
Again, fill us in and we can help you through it.
) in one partition and some flavor of Unix in another partition (–and other partitions for back-up, etc.).