I’m getting a 60 gig hard drive next week (I’m so happy, this is the first new computer thing I’ve purchased in three years!) I already have a 3 gig hard drive, which is partitioned into two drives. I’m planning to store all of my files on my boyfriend’s computer and then re-format the 3 gig drive, perhaps re-partitioning it back into one drive. I’m going to install Windows 98. My first question is, should I install the operating system on the new drive or the old one? Both drives are 5400 rpm Western Digital ide drives, but the 3 gig one is 4 or 5 years old. Still, if I put the operating system on the smaller drive, it could have the whole drive to itself.
My main question is, should I partion the bigger drive into 2-3 drives, or just keep it as 60 gigs?
MHO, make a 10-15 partition for the OS. If you want to upgrade, you’ll need it. I have XP, and like it, but it takes up alomst my entire 3.94 gig C: Then you can stick programs and all of your other crapola on D:, and still have room on C: to download dirty movies onto the desktop.
Depends on your hard drive partitioning type… if you do FAT 32 with Win 98 go for large… no reason to skimp… or hell have it be one big drive with FAT 32 you’re safe…
If you’re using regular FAT you want the smallest partitions possible (520mbish)
Even if you just use the big drive, it’s still a good idea to have at least two partitions. That way, when you have to reinstall windows (as most of us eventually do), you can move the stuff you want to save to the other partition and wipe C: for a clean install.
Reinstalling from within windows itself tends to leave all the crap that builds up and causes stability problems.
It’s also a way to backup stuff you download, in case windows hoses itself.
Remove the 3 gig drive. It ain’t worth keeping it in there. Partition the 60 into 2 or 3 drives, whichever takes your fancy. Whatever you do, make sure c: is big enough, I’d go with at least 10 gig. Nothing is worse than a system where the c: drive fills up
When you get a new drive (which one is this anyway? Maxtor?) you get software to install it. Then put in the operating system on it. Be sure your BIOS supports something that big otherwise its rather pointless.
I had to reinstall another operating system & I must say having two partitions or more makes it ALOT easier to do this cause you can copy all of C: to another partitiion first.
paritiion Magic software lets your change partition size, etc & keep your data, if you want to change it later.
As I said, be sure your BIOS supports something that big.
Most older motherboards (bios) will not support HD’s bigger than 32Gigs. So you’ll have to partition the new one.
I’m all in favor of partitions - put all your important data, like mp3’s, on the non-OS partition. That way, when Windows messes up, you don’t have to worry about burning all that data on CD’s. You just format your C: drive and everything’s good.
Oh yeah, do your partitions in FAT32. No point of doing plain FAT anymore.
And bravo for choosing Western Digital. Through trial and error, they’ve proven to be one of the best brands. Maxtor is evil.
Not necessarily. Sometimes you have to do things the hard way and use a boot disk (make one in Windows before installing the new hard drive), and then run the FDISK program in DOS.
I disagree wholeheartedly. I’ve been badly burned by Western Digital. Never been burned by Maxtor. Seven Maxtor hard drives have come and gone under my eyes with nary a glitch.
I would recommend partitioning it into at least two drives. Make a small drive at the front large enough to hold your principal OS. Make the rest into a “data & applications” drive. Install the OS in the first drive; install everything else onto the second. (This also means, for example, if you install something else, and it lets you give it a place to install, you should refuse the default and change the drive letter to the bigger second drive.) The advantage of doing this is that if you have to blow away and reinstall the OS (which, if you use Windows, you will have to do periodically) you don’t also have to back up all your data files because they’re on the other drive.
If you can, use NTFS instead of FAT. (Of course, this only applies if you are using NT4, Windows 2000, or Windows XP.)
If you are using Linux, then all of the foregoing does not apply. Contact me by (mailto:kmartin@pyrzqxgl.org) if you want advice on how to partition a Linux system.
There is no reason not to keep the old drive installed. It’s small, but it doesn’t hurt you to leave it in. I have a system upstairs that is still making quite happy use of a 1.02 GB hard drive.
True, mea culpa. I should have prefaced that with In my experience, Maxtor is evil.
Just a couple bad hard drive experiences. Everyone has 'em.
We get Western Digitals at work, and have had to ship one back almost as soon as it arrived, but considering how many we order, it’s a pretty reasonable percentage of error.
KellyM, how does the registry work into your scheme? Programs create registry entries when they’re installed, and you wouldn’t have those entries if you had to reinstall the OS.
“how does the registry work into your scheme? Programs create registry entries when they’re installed, and you wouldn’t have those entries if you had to reinstall the OS.”
Well, I use System Suite 2000 & it has a function to transfer old programs to another drive or computer with entries, etc for ya.
Yes, you will have to reinstall applications if you have to rebuild the OS, but at least you won’t have to try to recover your documents or datafiles.
If you really want to be safe, you should move your “My Documents” folder to another drive. That’s a bit difficult, though (requires tweaking the registry, as I recall) and may not be possible on the toy versions of Windows (95, 98, and Me).
I second the idea of separate partitions for Windows and data. The idea of separating Windows from other programs is pretty impractical though. The reason is that Windows create s a \Program Files directory on its own host drive and installs a lot of stuff there. Most other programs will also default to installing there as well. You can force them to go elsewhere but 1) there’s a small possibility that a program installed on a drive other than C: will not work properly and 2) you have to remember to do the change for every single program you install. In general it’s not worth it. My recommendation is three partitions, one for Windows and other installed programs, one for data files, and one small one, less than 1GB for the swap file.
If you want to keep the old 3GB drive, I recommend repartitioning it so that it consists of a single extended partition with one or more logical partitions inside. That way, it won’t alter any of your drive letter assignments if/when you take it out.
If you’re the sort of person who changes drives around even occasionally, there’s another recommendatoin I’d make. Force your CD-ROM drive to a much higher letter like X:. That way, changing drive letters on the hard disks won’t confuse programs that need to find it.
On another note, there’s a misconception being repeated here that I want to try to nip in the bud. It is not, repeat not, necessary or even particularly desirable to reformat the C: drive to do a clean re-install of Windows. All that is necessary is to rename the \Windows and \Program Files (aka \PROGRA~1) directories to something else at a DOS prompt. The Windows installer will detect an existing Windows installation and ask if you want to upgrade it. Answer No and it will create a new, completely fresh install in a new \Windows directory. The advantages of doing this are many. There’s almost no benefit to re-formatting can’t be had by just running scandisk.
I disagree. Many IT departments do this as a matter of course.
Yes, but only a small number of things actually go in there by default. Virtually all programs (these days) can be told to install to a “Program Files” directory on another drive.
The only one I’ve ever run into is Seagate Crystal Reports.
As an IT professional who has to rebuild user machines from time to time, I would say that it is worth it. YMMV.
Now that is a particularly bad idea: it will make your system slower unless you have a really smart disk controller (and even then there will still be a penalty as your hard drive disk heads go flying back and forth all over the disk).
Uh, no. Not only does this leave you with a badly fragmented drive (not to mention FAT rot, which is a general problem with FAT filesystems), but it doesn’t deal with the dozen-odd files that reside in the drive root, the boot loader, or the boot sector.
With FAT filesystems, it’s a good idea to completely wipe and restore your drive anyway from time to time, to combat FAT rot and fragmentation. System drives are even more prone to FAT rot and should have this done to them even more often than data drives. (Which is why you should use NTFS if at all possible. NTFS is a much more robust file system.)
So, yes, you can install Windows the way you suggest. It’s just not a good idea.
I second the idea of separate partitions for Windows and data. The idea of separating Windows from other programs is pretty impractical though. The reason is that Windows create s a \Program Files directory on its own host drive and installs a lot of stuff there. Most other programs will also default to installing there as well. You can force them to go elsewhere but 1) there’s a small possibility that a program installed on a drive other than C: will not work properly and 2) you have to remember to do the change for every single program you install. In general it’s not worth it. My recommendation is three partitions, one for Windows and other installed programs, one for data files, and one small one, less than 1GB for the swap file.
If you want to keep the old 3GB drive, I recommend repartitioning it so that it consists of a single extended partition with one or more logical partitions inside. That way, it won’t alter any of your drive letter assignments if/when you take it out.
If you’re the sort of person who changes drives around even occasionally, there’s another recommendatoin I’d make. Force your CD-ROM drive to a much higher letter like X:. That way, changing drive letters on the hard disks won’t confuse programs that need to find it.
On another note, there’s a misconception being repeated here that I want to try to nip in the bud. It is not, repeat not, necessary or even particularly desirable to reformat the C: drive to do a clean re-install of Windows. All that is necessary is to rename the \Windows and \Program Files (aka \PROGRA~1) directories to something else at a DOS prompt. The Windows installer will detect an existing Windows installation and ask if you want to upgrade it. Answer No and it will create a new, completely fresh install in a new \Windows directory. The advantages of doing this are many. There’s almost no benefit to re-formatting can’t be had by just running scandisk.
I second the idea of separate partitions for Windows and data. The idea of separating Windows from other programs is pretty impractical though. The reason is that Windows create s a \Program Files directory on its own host drive and installs a lot of stuff there. Most other programs will also default to installing there as well. You can force them to go elsewhere but 1) there’s a small possibility that a program installed on a drive other than C: will not work properly and 2) you have to remember to do the change for every single program you install. In general it’s not worth it. My recommendation is three partitions, one for Windows and other installed programs, one for data files, and one small one, less than 1GB for the swap file.
If you want to keep the old 3GB drive, I recommend repartitioning it so that it consists of a single extended partition with one or more logical partitions inside. That way, it won’t alter any of your drive letter assignments if/when you take it out.
If you’re the sort of person who changes drives around even occasionally, there’s another recommendatoin I’d make. Force your CD-ROM drive to a much higher letter like X:. That way, changing drive letters on the hard disks won’t confuse programs that need to find it.
On another note, there’s a misconception being repeated here that I want to try to nip in the bud. It is not, repeat not, necessary or even particularly desirable to reformat the C: drive to do a clean re-install of Windows. All that is necessary is to rename the \Windows and \Program Files (aka \PROGRA~1) directories to something else at a DOS prompt. The Windows installer will detect an existing Windows installation and ask if you want to upgrade it. Answer No and it will create a new, completely fresh install in a new \Windows directory. The advantages of doing this are many. There’s almost no benefit to re-formatting can’t be had by just running scandisk.
Sorry about the multiple posts. When I pressed submit (three times) it just sat there until I killed the window – I didn’t think they actually got posted.
KellyM, I’ve never heard the term FAT Rot. Can you explain?
It refers to the general recognition by most of the people that work with Windows systems on a regular basis that FAT filesystems “rot” over time (mainly because FAT was never designed for anything larger than a floppy) and get progressively worse and worse. The regular use of defragmenters and chkdsk/scandisk helps to stave it off, but you’re better off using a real filesystem.
Personally, I have always kept data and OS separated. But lately I have gone one step further.
On drive C: Windows 2000
Drive D: Page file
Drive E: Temp files
Drives F - J saved for mapping to network shares at work through VPN.
Drive K: DVD-rom
Drives L - X: data and mp3s
I have two Seagate 180GB SCSI Barracuda drives in my system. Can you tell I like to store MP3s? = )
I’m currently building a Linux file server and adding 4- IBM GXP60 60GB drives. I know about the high RMA rate of the 75GXPs, but I have used IBM in the past with no issues.
Just a reiteration to what was said above. Keep the data separate from the OS and you will save yourself many headaches when it comes to reinstalling the OS (regardless of operating system).
