If it involved a clean install of XP the XP setup program could easily make you a dozen partitions just for giggles. Next time he comes over you might want to point him at something like This so he can modify partitions on the fly.
Give it a good 10GB at least, some apps dont like to play nice with other drives so you need some breathing room. If you don’t do things like ITunes and don’t use a lot of data storage 10GB as a data partition is more than enough. I usually just split them down the middle and call it good.
I tend to agree with partitioning a single drive into OS and data. More than that is probably overkill. As I’ve got multiple hard drives, I generally don’t bother partitioning. Of course, I use a 40-gig drive for the OS(es), and a combination of a 160-gig drive and two 320-gig drives for data and programs and the like. Then again, I’ve also got most of the alphabet used for drive letters (four physical hard drives with one additional logical drive, three optical drives, six virtual optical drives, zip drive, four drives for various media cards, and I generally keep a USB thumb drive or two in there along with the iPod when connected.)
It is easy to add extra partitions on any MS OS based system. It is trivial to the max to do it on a clean drive. If you have any basic tech knowledge about MS filesystems.
Your guy doesn’t have a clue about something that is very, very basic.
Since he could only set up 2 partitions, I suspect he wasn’t doing things right. (E.g., using the wrong version of FDISK on a large drive.) So there is a good chance the drive is not currently partitioned like it should be (such as some space being unused or worse).
[ul]
[li]It makes upgrading easier. You know which partitions contain your personal data and the programs you installed yourself and which partitions contain data supplied by the OS (and therefore need to get blown away and replaced by the new OS).[/li][li]It makes backups easier. Assuming you have high-density backup media, like tapes or DVD-Rs. If all you can swing are CD-Rs, this isn’t something you can take advantage of. (You need the ability to blast a whole partition onto a backup disk or tape. CD-Rs don’t have the capacity if your partition is more than 700 Megs or so.)[/li][li]It makes it easier to manage your disk’s space. One partition (your porn-tition ;)) filling up isn’t a big deal. Your whole hard disk having no free sectors is.[/li][/ul]
There’s also the matter of Defrag, Anti-virus, and adware removal tools. These things take forever on a massive 250gig drive.
With NTFS partitions, most people don’t need to defragment their drives. Until a NTFS partition gets full, NTFS is somewhat resilient to fragmentation. A limited amount of fragmentation doesn’t matter. And even with significant fragmentation, the performance boost is small. FAT32 is another matter. Further, what many people don’t realise is that you can get irreversible fragmentation: on many drives, if a sector fails, it is dynamically swapped out from a small pool of reserve sectors, so the drive head is going to jump regardless.
Yep, but the bigger the drive, the longer chkdsk will take. If a 250Gb single partition starts up dirty, chkdsk will take quite a while to clean and mount the file system. If a system with the same 250Gb disk spilt into (say) 5 50Gb filesystems goes down, then not all the partitions will end up dirty, and the system will probably be able to start after checking the 50Gb boot partition, much faster than a single partition. And - as noted - a single file system corruption cannot take your system and data out.
I’ll continue with multiple partitions, but am planning to use mount points for Program Files and Documents and Settings if I ever reinstall a Windows OS.
Si
Is there an easy way to change the partitions on Windows XP without buying anything? My VAIO came with a partitioned drive, but the C drive is pretty small, and the D drive is huge but almost empty. I keep getting messages that I’m dangerously low on space, which I think would be solved by giving some of D’s space to good old C.
Ranish partition editor is one free tool. GPartEd has a bootable CD tool as well. Make sure you fully back up your system first. YMMV.
Si
My Dad is always doing this. I say always, because he ends up ‘tuning’ his computer to the point that it is beyond repair, gets frustrated and just buys a new one. About once a year.
He does nothing special or exotic with it, if he would just leave it alone, it would be fine.
I’ve pretty much given up. At one point he had a 24 charactor upper and lower case ADMIN password because “that’s what Microsoft recommended”. :rolleyes:
He is the only one in his house. He is the only one that ever uses the box.
Thank you.
I live in group two. I seem to always date (and am related to) group three. Very frustrating.
This is exactly why I keep the OS/programs on one drive and my data on the other. And it saved me a lot of work recently when I had to wipe and reinstall a corrupted OS. Sure, I had to reinstall all the programs, but I didn’t need to do anything to recover my data, which was safely on another drive. Actually now I’m also keeping all my program install files in a separate drive from my OS, so that I can reinstall them easily if I have to do that again.
I believe this is no longer a significant factor for the everyday user. This used to be the case with Windows NT and 2000 - there was a limit on the amount of memory that CHKDSK would use - but with XP and Windows Server 2003, CHKDSK will use all available memory and this is not really a problem. I’ve seen CHKDSK do a 1 TB volume with only a modest pause on a W2003 server whereas a NT server took several hours to check a 200 GB volume.
My own XP machine has 750 GB of space in one partition with 200 GB of data including over 250K very small files, so perhaps 350K files total and Chkdsk after a crash takes very little time - mere seconds.
Of course, if you’re using the /R switch, that’s a different matter entirely.
I do what others say they do - I keep Windows on its own partition (maybe 30GB?) in case I need to do a format/reinstall. It’s a happy time when you know you don’t have to do any fiddling with your 700GB of data just because Windows is fux0r3d.
I did have to learn the hard way to make the Windows partition as big as I can stand it. And also NOT to do any partitioning for machines I set up for my family, because no one knows that any folders other than DESKTOP and MY DOCUMENTS exist. It’s easier for me just to keep a spare external HDD around to back up their data before I wipe their virus-ridden machine than to explain to them how not to keep everything in MY DOCUMENTS.
Your best bet to to reassign My Documents to the D: partition in XP. Then there’s no need to retrain them, Windows will happily allow them to pile data onto the data partition without their knowledge. Then you can blow away the OS partition any time you want and remap the My Documents folder to it’s location on D: when you reinstall.
“Everyday users” and “regular backups” almost never cross path in real life. You can pray and wish and idealize all you want, but these two concepts will never overlap. It’s much wiser to simply assume that every “typical user” will utterly demolish their OS at some point requiring a full reformat and that they will not have a current back-up and restore point.
As such, a OS partition and a Data partition are the prudent and simplest course of action. As the OP noted, disk space is very cheap and very easy to add. Hence, you should never have a situation where the OS partition gets full unless you make a very poor choice when you partition it initially. Arguing that “partitions can’t change size on the fly” is really a red herring. This is a very rare issue, compared to the frequency of OS crashes. If an OS crashes on a one-partition HD and requires a reformat, it’s a much more difficult process to salvage data than it is to resize an mis-assigned partition on a 2 partition HD.
There isn’t a single compelling reason not to partition. I agree that it’s not exactly a boon to personal computing, and certainly not a necessity, but once anyone does a clean OS install you can see that it has one benefit over using a single partition.
With the advent of USB HDDs I believe that this is no longer the case. It’s cheap and easy and quick.
If you’re only reinstalling Windows, you should never need to reformat.
The problem has never been storage or cost, it’s simply getting people to do it regularly. That doesn’t happen and there isn’t a mainstream, free application out there that automates the process.
Yikes, anyone ever have your Windows system partition run out of space? That alone should make you think that keeping your fluid data storage separate for your system volume.
…and nobody does it. I agree with Omniscient – of the seventy or so “regular users” that seem to believe I’m their first line of tech support, I know of only three that routinely back up anything in any way, despite my harping on all of them them about USB drives. (“But those cost like $100, and that space is just wasted!”) A few back up a few files to CD or DVD, one keeps her photos on the memory cards from her camera – when it fills up, she buys a new one, just like film (and yes, she’s lost a ton of them when the memory cards inevitably fail.)