# Partitioning the HDD on my new Dell. **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [June 18, 2004, 9:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/partitioning-the-hdd-on-my-new-dell/251121 "2004-06-18T21:57:33Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 12\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![mhendo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mhendo/32/3159_2.png) [@mhendo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mhendo)\ **Post date:** [June 18, 2004, 9:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/partitioning-the-hdd-on-my-new-dell/251121/1 "2004-06-18T21:57:33Z")
My spanking new Dell computer arrived today, and it’s up and running, although i haven’t yet connected it to the internet, because it needs virus protection, firewall, spywareblaster, etc. before i’m willing to expose it to cyberspace. I’m typing this on my old system. Anyway, i remember reading in a thread a while back that, when you take delivery of a new computer from a company like Dell, it’s a good idea to reinstall the OS (WinXP Home) in order to get rid of some of the crap that Dell puts on the computer. I also believe it’s good to partition the hard drive. The drive on my new machine is 148Gb (Nominally 160, according to Dell, but 148 when viewed in Windows Control Panel). So, i thought i’d reinstall Windows and partition the hard drive. There’s a tutorial on the Microsoft website explaining how to do it: [support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;[LN];Q313348](http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;%5BLN%5D;Q313348) (you might need to cut and paste the link, as VBulletin can’t seem to parse square brackets in urls). Here’s what they say to do: > [@](#): > > How to partition and format your hard disk by using the Windows XP Setup program > Important If you follow these steps on a hard disk that is not empty, all the data on that hard disk is permanently deleted. We recommend that you back up your hard disk before you follow these steps. > > To partition and format your hard disk by using the Windows XP Setup program: > > 1. Insert the Windows XP CD-ROM into your CD-ROM drive or DVD-ROM drive, or insert the first Windows XP Setup disk into the floppy disk drive, and then restart the computer. > > Note To start your computer from the Windows XP CD-ROM (or from the startup disk), your computer must be configured to start from the CD-ROM drive, the DVD-ROM drive, or the floppy disk drive. In some cases, you may have to modify your computer’s BIOS settings to set this configuration. For information about how to configure your computer to start from the CD-ROM drive, the DVD-ROM drive, or the floppy disk drive, see the documentation that is included with your computer, or contact the computer manufacturer. > > 1. If you are starting the computer from the Windows XP CD-ROM, select any options that are required to start the computer from the CD-ROM drive if you are prompted to do this. > > Note If your hard disk controller requires a third-party original equipment manufacturer (OEM) driver, press F6 to specify the driver. > > For additional information about how to use F6 to supply a third-party OEM device driver while the Windows Setup program is running, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: > 314859 Limited OEM driver support is available with F6 during Windows XP Setup > > If you are starting from the Windows XP Setup disks, insert each of the additional disks when you are prompted, and then press ENTER to continue after you insert each disk. > > 3.At the Welcome to Setup page, press ENTER. > > 1. Press F8 to accept the Windows XP Licensing Agreement. > > 5.If an existing Windows XP installation is detected, you are prompted to repair it. To bypass the repair, press ESC. > > 1. All the existing partitions and the unpartitioned spaces are listed for each physical hard disk. Use the ARROW keys to select the partition or the unpartitioned space where you want to create a new partition. Press D to delete an existing partition, or press C to create a new partition by using unpartitioned space. If you press D to delete an existing partition, you must then press L (or press ENTER, and then press L if it is the System partition) to confirm that you want to delete the partition. Repeat this step for each of the existing partitions that you want to use for the new partition. When all the partitions are deleted, select the remaining unpartitioned space, and then press C to create the new partition. > > Note If you want to create a partition where one or more partitions already exist, you must first delete the existing partition or partitions, and then create the new partition. > > 7.Type the size in megabytes (MB) that you want to use for the new partition, and then press ENTER, or just press ENTER to create the partition with the maximum size. > > 1. Repeat Steps 4 and 5 to create additional partitions if you want them. > > 2. If you want to install Windows XP, use the ARROW keys to select the partition where you want to install Windows XP, and then press ENTER. If you do not want to format the partition and install Windows XP, press F3 two times to quit the Windows Setup program, and then do not follow the remaining steps. In this case, you must use a different utility to format the partition. > > 3. Select the format option that you want to use for the partition, and then press ENTER. You have the following options: > Format the partition by using the NTFS file system (Quick) > Format the partition by using the FAT file system (Quick) > Format the partition by using the NTFS file system > Format the partition by using the FAT file system > Leave the current file system intact (no changes) > The option to leave the current file system intact is not available if the selected partition is a new partition. The FAT file system option is not available if the selected partition is more than 32 gigabytes (GB). If the partition is larger than 2 GB, the Windows Setup program uses the FAT32 file system (you must press ENTER to confirm). If the partition is smaller than 2 GB, the Windows Setup program uses the FAT16 file system. > > Note If you deleted and created a new System partition, but you are installing Windows XP on a different partition, you will be prompted to select a file system for both the System and startup partitions. > 11. After the Windows Setup program formats the partition, follow the instructions that appear on the screen to continue. After the Windows Setup program is completed, you can use the Disk Management tools in Windows XP to create or format more partitions. For the most part it looks pretty straightforward. There are two parts i’m a little worried about, however. First, the bit in section 2 where it warns about the possible need for an OEM driver for the hard disk controller. I’m not sure if i will need one, or if this will mess up my reinstalation. One of the CDs that came with the computer is called “Dell Dimension ResourceCD.” Would this have a driver for the HD controller on it? Second, which of the partition format options should i choose? NTFS or FAT? What’s the difference? Finally, what good does a partition actually do? Everyone seems to use them nowdays, but i don’t quite understand why. Also, what size partitioning should i use on a 148Gb hard drive? I’d appreciate any advice you might have. ---
**Author:** ![leenmi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/f1d935/32.png) [@leenmi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/leenmi)\ **Post date:** [June 18, 2004, 10:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/partitioning-the-hdd-on-my-new-dell/251121/2 "2004-06-18T22:11:11Z")
First, go with NTFS. It is a newer file system with more features. Second, don’t worry about the OEM driver for the hard disk controller. Yours isn’t external and it was made recently. Manufacturers can ignore every other operating system in the world, but if they don’t work with Microsoft the gods get angry and throw Coke bottles at aborigines. So it will work. People add partitions for several reasons, including legacy habits. For a 160GB disk (in salesfolk units), if you had to check your disk after, say, a sudden power outage, it could take a long time. By partitioning, you can limit the checks to portions (partitions) of your hard disk. By putting your OS on drive C: which is only 4-6GB, you only check 4-6GB of disk space to make sure that your OS binaries are OK. In the other partitions, you might be willing to stand a chance of corruption in favor of quicker reboot and tell the system not to check drives E, F, G or whatever the partitions are mounted as. Also, in UNIX flavors, we partition to protect the root file system. If I, as a the foolish user I am, do something silly that fills up my home directory and my home directory is on the same partition as the root filey system, then I, the foolish user, have made the system unusable for everybody. By partitioning off the users from the operating system, the user only affects silly users and the operating system can still be used to repair my mistake. So, partitioning provides some measure of protection. Another thing it provides is the ability to upgrade the operating system without affecting my data and add-on applications. If I re-install or upgrade the files on the root file system (or C: drive), and all the programs, files, pictures, mail, spam and junk I’ve collected over the years is on a different partition, it doesn’t get overwritten. Not sure how well Windows does this. It should write to drive C: and leave all the other drives alone unless told to do otherwise. Anyway, I’ll stop now. Use NTFS (much improved over FAT) and partition if you feel you must. If you do partition, make the C: drive less than or equal to 10GB and put your home directories on one of the other partitions. That way you won’t fill up C: with junk. If you’re worried about such a thing. ---
**Author:** ![mhendo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mhendo/32/3159_2.png) [@mhendo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mhendo)\ **Post date:** [June 18, 2004, 10:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/partitioning-the-hdd-on-my-new-dell/251121/3 "2004-06-18T22:26:52Z")
Thaks for the advice, **leenmi**. One thing though. It seemed from your post that you were suggesting partitioning the hard drive into more than two sections. The way i’ve seen it done on other computers is that the drive is generally split into two–one drive © of about 10-15Mb, and the other (D) taking up the rest of the space. Is there a better way to do it than that? ---
**Author:** ![daffyduck](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ec9cab/32.png) [@daffyduck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/daffyduck)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2004, 12:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/partitioning-the-hdd-on-my-new-dell/251121/4 "2004-06-19T00:52:40Z")
Did you check to make sure that you actually got a Windows XP CD? I thought Dell stopped shipping Windows disks as part of their license agreement and now only ship recovery disks. Things may have changed, but you should definitely check first. I see no real advantage for most people to create more than two partitions (one for the OS and one for everything else) but power users who do stuff like also running a webserver on their personal machines often like to put the server on its own partition and some gamers that I know also keep their games on separate partitions for their own reasons. It is really up to you. ---
**Author:** ![leenmi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/f1d935/32.png) [@leenmi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/leenmi)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2004, 1:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/partitioning-the-hdd-on-my-new-dell/251121/5 "2004-06-19T01:13:56Z")
**mhendo** , I’m not sure what the other people were trying to accomplish with the 10-15MB C: Drive. I’ve seen some of the Gentoo Linux folk break out their /boot directory onto it’s own partition so that if the root filesystem got corrupted the boot files were still available, but I don’t know if this adds any value to Windows. For the systems that do this, are they trying to protect the MBR? I wouldn’t bother with partitioning unless you have a reason. A smaller C: drive so fdisk doesn’t take so long after recovery is a reason. (or maybe Microsoft could put out a journaled file system for home use. Seriously. All the other operating systems have it). Doing it because you’ve seen it done may not be good enough. A lot of times, people do things because that’s the way it has been done in the past, with no thought to whether the reasons hat were compelling in the past are still compelling. Like people still breaking out /usr. ---
**Author:** ![mhendo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mhendo/32/3159_2.png) [@mhendo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mhendo)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2004, 1:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/partitioning-the-hdd-on-my-new-dell/251121/6 "2004-06-19T01:27:20Z")
Thanks for the advice, folks. In the end, i decided not to bother with the partition. It’s something i don’t understand too well, and it seems that most people i know get by without it. I did, however, reinstall windows so i could get rid of some of the crappy software that Dell loads onto its computers. **Daffyduck** , it is indeed a recovery disc, but it worked fine. It wiped everything off the drive and reinstalled Windows without any trouble. ---
**Author:** ![Dewey\_Cheatem\_Undhow](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/13edae/32.png) [@Dewey\_Cheatem\_Undhow](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dewey_Cheatem_Undhow)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2004, 4:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/partitioning-the-hdd-on-my-new-dell/251121/7 "2004-06-19T16:21:11Z")
> [@leenmi](#): > > For the systems that do this, are they trying to protect the MBR? I wouldn’t bother with partitioning unless you have a reason. A smaller C: drive so fdisk doesn’t take so long after recovery is a reason. (or maybe Microsoft could put out a journaled file system for home use. Seriously. All the other operating systems have it). NTFS is a journaled filesystem (unlike the older FAT32, which is not) and is included in all variants of XP, including XP Home. ---
**Author:** ![astro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/9dc877/32.png) [@astro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/astro)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2004, 4:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/partitioning-the-hdd-on-my-new-dell/251121/8 "2004-06-19T16:41:45Z")
> [@mhendo](#): > > Thanks for the advice, folks. > > In the end, i decided not to bother with the partition. It’s something i don’t understand too well, and it seems that most people i know get by without it. > > I did, however, reinstall windows so i could get rid of some of the crappy software that Dell loads onto its computers. **Daffyduck** , it is indeed a recovery disc, but it worked fine. It wiped everything off the drive and reinstalled Windows without any trouble. Ummm… most “recovery disk” install procedures are simply pasting a pre-made disk image onto your drive (including the crapware) , not clean installing XP from scratch. I’d be surprised if the XP OS you have now is any different from the one the unit came with originally. ---
**Author:** ![mhendo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mhendo/32/3159_2.png) [@mhendo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mhendo)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2004, 5:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/partitioning-the-hdd-on-my-new-dell/251121/9 "2004-06-19T17:39:09Z")
> [@astro](#): > > Ummm… most “recovery disk” install procedures are simply pasting a pre-made disk image onto your drive (including the crapware) , not clean installing XP from scratch. I’d be surprised if the XP OS you have now is any different from the one the unit came with originally. I must admit that i don’t know much about this; all i know is that after i formatted the hard-drive and reinstalled Windows, there were nowhere near as many useless programs as before. Now, it could be that these useless programs had been installed from some of the other disks that came with the computer. From those other disks, i only installed the stuff that i wanted. Either way, there’s far less junk in my system tray now, and i have installed all my own programs and put them where i want them, so i’m happy. ---
**Author:** ![mhendo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mhendo/32/3159_2.png) [@mhendo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mhendo)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2004, 5:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/partitioning-the-hdd-on-my-new-dell/251121/10 "2004-06-19T17:40:25Z")
One more thing: One program that does open in the system tray each time is the Creative Diagnostics Agent. Should i leave this, or is it better to get rid of it? ---
**Author:** ![daffyduck](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ec9cab/32.png) [@daffyduck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/daffyduck)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2004, 7:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/partitioning-the-hdd-on-my-new-dell/251121/11 "2004-06-19T19:15:49Z")
The fact that Creative decided to make their Diagnostic Agent run in the system tray is so incredibly dumb that I don’t get it at all. It is basically saying that their soundcards are so prone to problems that you need this baby ready at a moment’s notice. They should not only fire the genius that came up with this idea, they should burn him at the stake. Disable it. ---
**Author:** ![Rex\_Fenestrarum](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rex_fenestrarum/32/7265_2.png) [@Rex\_Fenestrarum](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rex_Fenestrarum)\ **Post date:** [June 20, 2004, 1:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/partitioning-the-hdd-on-my-new-dell/251121/12 "2004-06-20T01:30:17Z")
> [@astro](#): > > Ummm… most “recovery disk” install procedures are simply pasting a pre-made disk image onto your drive (including the crapware) , not clean installing XP from scratch. I’d be surprised if the XP OS you have now is any different from the one the unit came with originally. **Astro** : Dell usually ships their PCs with 3 “recovery” CDs - one (or more) with the system image, one with the drivers and one with most of the bundled software. So while running a “restore” isn’t as good as a fresh reinstall, it does get rid of most of the crap - except driver-related apps like the Creative thing. Also, two other things: NTFS is only partially journaled. Not realy as robust as most \*nix filesystems, but far, far better than FAT. XP needs _at least_ 10GB of disk space for an installation, unless you’re installing everything to D:\Program Files for some reason. My XP installs usually come out to 6-7GB with Office, Photoshop, Acrobat, etc. And that’s not including a hibernation file (1GB on my system) and the space System Restore uses. And don’t forget apps that are too stupid to have tweakible options for temp file and “workspace” usage. So in real-world use, it’s constantly bumping the 10GB limit, which is why I went with a 20GB system partition, even if it’s never gone over 12GB in use.