Not as much storage as I thought!!

Leigh_Albone

One thing no one has metioned

A lot of PC and lap top maufacturers partition the hard drive so that you have your normal c: drive (operating system and data) but then on another partition have an image of the drive as it was purchased.

If a buiyer wishes to restore the system to shop bought status, all the recovery cd does is copy an image from this extra partition to the C: drive wiping everything the user has saved.

This explains the difference in drive capacity and what you actually see in windows.

Leigh

bitsnbytes

norbie wrote: »

Normally when you install software you can choose a custom installation and tell it where to install to.

So for instance you could install to C:/Program Files or E:/Program Files - wherever you want to.

It annoys me when a drive comes with 2 partitions. Some manufacturers like to split programs from Windows in case something goes wrong. All a bit pointless in my eyes...

Actually I'm the bigest fan of a separate partition for my OS and another for my data and actually get annoyed when manufacturers ship computers with just one partition. I've found that around 50GB is quite enough for most installs and I make sure all applications are installed onto C:

Once I've done this, and I call this my 'ideal setup' with all my applications and their settings tuned to my needs, I then take a ghost backup of C: which I can restore in case of any problems and presto the computer is back to the way I want it Since my data is on another partition nothing is affected.

Just a word of caution though when using ghost, make sure you select partition restore. If you choose hdd restore it wipes out even the partition table and restores your image. So even though you do have your 'ideal setup' you've lost all your data :eek: and is quite difficult to recover. This happened to my wifes computer when my head refused to work in the wee hours of the morning. Needless to say I had to cook many a dinner for myself I spent almost a week trying to recover her data.

Just my 2p

bitsnbytes

Also, if you have another hdd, you can assign the first partition of the second HDD as your swap space. I reckon around 5GB should be fine if you have 2GB of RAM. This really improves performance :T

R0CKY wrote: »

Vyseyboy is correct. Two partitions is an excellent idea. One partition should be kept for the OS and program installs, the other drive for raw data. That way if you ever have a serious system failure, your data should be safe on the second partition. Also, when you are doing system maintenance such as defragging you can save time by only doing the partition that needs it.

Westiefan should install his programs to the c drive, but the data (ie. the movies/photos) should be saved to the other partition. You can install many apps in the 20Gb doing it that way, but you really want to make sure you keep at the very least 5Gb free space on the OS partition.

Tribulation

fmervin wrote: »

Actually I'm the bigest fan of a separate partition for my OS and another for my data and actually get annoyed when manufacturers ship computers with just one partition. I've found that around 50GB is quite enough for most installs and I make sure all applications are installed onto C:

Once I've done this, and I call this my 'ideal setup' with all my applications and their settings tuned to my needs, I then take a ghost backup of C: which I can restore in case of any problems and presto the computer is back to the way I want it Since my data is on another partition nothing is affected.

Just a word of caution though when using ghost, make sure you select partition restore. If you choose hdd restore it wipes out even the partition table and restores your image. So even though you do have your 'ideal setup' you've lost all your data :eek: and is quite difficult to recover. This happened to my wifes computer when my head refused to work in the wee hours of the morning. Needless to say I had to cook many a dinner for myself I spent almost a week trying to recover her data.

Just my 2p

I do something very similar.

I have two disks. Did a reformat and new install of Vista, Office 2007 and all other software/games I regularly use. Got everything activated and set-up 100% how I want it.

I then use Tru image to make a disk image and store it on my other drive, along with all my data.

I don't have system restore turned on.

If I do get any problems with anything, I don't have to worry about backing up anything, I simply boot off of the Tru Image DVD, restore my C partition, let it chug away for an hour and I'm back with everything set up 100% how I want it, with all my data nice and safe on my second drive.

(of course I do also backup needed data from my second drive on a regular basis)

bitsnbytes

Tribulation wrote: »

I don't have system restore turned on.

That's an idea Never occured to me to turn off System Restore, save some disc space And some windows overheads

Tribulation wrote: »

If I do get any problems with anything, I don't have to worry about backing up anything, I simply boot off of the Tru Image DVD, restore my C partition, let it chug away for an hour

Wow, does it take that long :eek: I'd suggest you give norton ghost a try, it takes around 20 mins to create the image (depending on the partition size), however, it restores in around 5-8 mins (again depending on the partition size)

timbim_2

Now a seprate partiton for swap is a good idea! Windows computers have this horrible problem of fragmenting the swap file, so even if you go through the process of defragmenting it, which takes a while, you then have to do the whole thing again a week later!

Conor_3

WestieFan wrote: »

Before I install my photo/video software (Elements, Pinnacle, etc), I was wondering if I could save them to the C drive along with Vista to save a bit of space on the E (Data) drive, as there appears to be around 20gb free on C? Or is this not a good idea?

VISTA CAN RESIZE PARTITIONS WITHOUT DELETING THEM. Unlike XP, Vistas Disk Manager allows you to shrink and extend partition sizes in the same way you could with something like Partition Magic.

I expect drive e: will be the recovery partition. If it were me, I'd shrink that to around 10GB and extend the C one.