Help me partition my hard drive - Advice needed

[williamd]

Do games run just as fast if they are on installed a separate partition? In the past, I have always installed them on the same partition as my OS. However:

I am thinking of having 4 partitions on one of my 1TB drives.

Would this make sense:

Partition 1: XP 64
Partition 2: Vista 64
Partition 3: Installed Games
Partition 4: Data

If I install all of my games on Partition 3, will I be able to run them immediately after I've done a reinstall on Vista? Or will I need to install them again? Stupid question but something I think would be pretty good if it did work.

Also, please recommend sizes for my OS drives, taking into consideration that neither of them will have any games installed on them. I was thinking:

XP - 40 GB
Vista - 60GB

Is there any need for them to be this big though? I don't want to lose any performance but I don't want them to be any bigger than necessary.

 

[PhoenixUK]

Most of them would work fine, some might need to be reinstalled.

And the speed depends on the harddrive , not partition.
Make sure that you install DX9 as well as 10 on vista since most games installed under XP will need DX9 to run.

I have both vista and XP and the games are running fine on both even tho they're installed on one. The only thing is that vista always messes up drive names.
For example I have in XP C- system, D- software, E-storage, F- vista G-general portable hdd. and when I boot into Vista it changes letters so like F becomes C, C becomes D, D becomes E etc . but its all working fine. apart from shortcuts or winamp list .

 

[williamd]

I hadn't considered playing the same games through both operating systems but I suppose I could, now that I know it's possible.

The only thing I would like to do then is ensure saved games are always saved on the Games partition, but as far as I know, they always save in My Documents. Not sure if I can change this.

 

[Banjo]

The only thing is that vista always messes up drive names.

That's not really a problem with Vista, I don't think, it's just that the OS's labelled the partitions differently when they were set up.

You can change the drive letters in the Disk Management section of the Computer Management tool located within the Administrative Tools.
Or, to put it much more clearly p):
Start Orb > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Storage > Disk Management > (Right click on a partition) "Change Drive Letter and Paths..."

That should solve your problem. Just be careful because if you've installed software then you change the drive letter your shortcuts obviously won't work anymore and any software that you've installed in Vista that's installed to a different drive might not work anymore, because the registry keys will point to the wrong drive.

Sorry if that wasn't clear... it's a Saturday morning

Banjo