Help - Partitioning Drives

BillScarab

Acronis is also free if you have a Seagate or Maxtor hard drive. On the Seagate website you can download a program called Disk Wizard which is a rebadged version of Acronis. On the Maxtor website I believe it is called Max Blast and again is really just Acronis. It's an excellent bit of software.

BillScarab

LuciferTDark wrote: »

I dual booted XP & Vista for a while but after not firing it up for 2 months I scrapped it & stuck with XP, Vista looks nice but I just don't want all the extra security rubbish Microsoft put in to "protect" me.

Apologies for the Dp.

Out of interest why didn't you just turn off UAC and run an administrator account all of the time?

Greensprout

spakkker wrote: »

Hi greensprout , just a suggestion, which I've only recently learned, is to make an image of the installed o.s with the necessary progs installed. I used acronis but I think there are free progs. The image is put on the other partition and the whole lot can be re-installed in 5 MINS. -far easier than fresh install. Acronis actually compresses the image and it may well be only 2 gb.

I just prefer to have seperate partitions for music, movies, photos etc..
I guess I have a case of OCD..

GoofyGAT

Not sure whether Vista-compatible or not, but try the free Paragon Hard Disk Manager 8 (v8.5 is the latest & definitely works on Vista). Webpage says it's expired, but all links are still valid - I only downloaded/installed it a few days ago on XP.

Greensprout wrote: »

I just prefer to have seperate partitions for music, movies, photos etc..
I guess I have a case of OCD..

You're not alone :shhh:, G

albertross_2

vista has its own repartitioning tool, diskmgmt.msc

bookduck

Jon_S wrote: »

ive never understood why people would partition a drive.

It has to do with speed, fragmentation, data separation, cluster size (in some cases), backups, but can be pain to administer.

.......Say on 3 partitions (c: d: e: ) .......
The quickest part of the disk is the beginning (c: ), so this is where you want your swap file, and you don't want your swap file fragmented or scattered over tracks as that will take some of the speed away. You don't want to backup the swap file as a new one will be created on boot up, but you do want to image/backup the rest of the c: partition.

Next are the system and 'vital' files (d: ). These you don't really want these to be scattered and you also want fast access. You want to back these up a one lump as it is easier to recover to get control of your disk fast if problems occur. They probably are around 6 Gig in size (if you put your essential apps in there too), so with compression on Ghost all will fit onto 1 dvd with enough space available to squeeze the small system partition (c: ) image into the dvd as well.

If you get a virus or crash, with 1 dvd you can get back your boot (c: ) and system partition (d: ) very quickly (within minutes if it is not a hardware fault)

Last is the data partition, Your pc will work without this. You can back this up any way you wish, send it to friends etc. -it is just data.

Administration is a bit harder as when you install an app it will probably want to install it in the sytem patrition (d: ), but in most cases you want to install it to e:, so you have to change the drive letter you just have to think a bit and chane the letter.
Problem 2: Some apps just decide that the system partition (d: ) is where to put all the temp files and/or images e.g. dvd burning and if you do not have 4GB+ free you will get error messages and will not be able to burn, so you will have to leave a few gig here - all depends on your apps!

For quick recovery, beside having a dvd with c: and d: data on them, store these files onto the e: drive. if you have a crash/problem that is not hardware related, boot from your Ghost cd and tell it where to find the images and within minutes in will build your c: and d: drive again. If it is hardware fault, just replace the faulty drive and within 15 mins you have your system working and set up the way you wanted it (minus the data e: of couse)