How should I partition my hard drive ?

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Hi Guys

Right, Now I will be getting a 250Gig SATA2 harddrive soon for my new pc build and am wondering how I should set up the partitions on it, first of all let me show you how I think I should do it:


250 GIG SATA2

1 partition(not sure what size I should make it, or what benefits it may have ?) for JUST the Operating System ?

Then rest for games and apps ?

Perhaps a partition for a pagefile, I dont really understand this completely, but the pc I am building will have 2 gig of ram.


I might still use this harddrive to test vista out and then maybe get its own harddrive if all is good, as I would want to keep xp while I test it.

what size partition should I make to keep space to allow to test and install a few games n stuff ? I know vista takes a lot for installation, so maybe 70 gig ?


I await your views and/or suggestions


Cheers

Slinger
 
Slinger said:
None of you guys must be very good at hard drive knowledge then....
No, some of us weren't reading the forum late last night.

I don't see the point in separating the OS from the installed apps. The main benefit of partitioning as far as I'm concerned is that you can reinstall the OS without overwriting your docs etc on the D: drive but you'll need to reinstall all the apps and games anyway to reset the registry keys so why not have them in the same partition as the OS?

If you create a partition during the XP install then it ends up in the fastest part of the disk so by having another partition for either apps or the pagefile will force them onto a slower portion of the disk.

If you want to play with Vista on the same disk then you'll need to decide now because shrinking existing partitions can be a real pain. Personally I'd pick up a cheap HDD when you're ready to try it, that way you can get complete separation between the two OSes and if you don't like it you've got a spare HDD for docs, backups etc, either internally or you can pick up an external caddy fairly cheaply.
 
The best way to partition is this... assuming that u have only 1 OS u want to run, say XP. You should partition your OS as C: and give it around 20-30 gigs, shouldnt need more, then install your stuff of D: with your data on there too.

Reason behind this is that if you can keep your OS section small enough, you can easily image it every once in a while and restore it if things go bad with a virus or something. Also, if you have your apps/games on a separate partition u are more likely to have your saved games/or files ** working on in that partition, not on the OS drive. The main benefit is to keep things easy to restore quickly.

The biggest benefit is that if you install everything on D:, your OS drive will be small - once you're done, u image it, put the image on D. If your OS partition goes all bad, or u see that XP is starting to behave badly, the nice thing is u can replace the OS partition and u wont have to install anything except whatever u put in after u made the image.

I hope that helps :)
 
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