How would you set your hard disks?

OzZie

OzZie

OzZie

Soldato
Joined
9 Jul 2004
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Nottingham
This is my issue:

I have two hard drives. One small 7200rpm W/D 40GB IDE that i bought around a year ago, and a new SATAII 500GB Samsung T that was on this week only.

At the moment, my XP install is on my 40GB IDE, and my documents is set to my 500GB SATA. The first problem lies with the fact that i am unable to install XP on the SATA from the XP CD, because it doesnt recognise it. I have tried making a Nlite'd version of XP but that didnt seem to work, although i may have set the drivers to the wrong setting (text mode and something else), so i may be able to counter this issue. Getting it to recognise in XP once installed is easy though (just install Via 4 in 1).

Now, i have my copy of Vista that i am ready to re-install now that the final version of SP1 is upon us. Vista of course has built in SATA drivers for my new drive and so i can install it onto there from fresh. However, i would need to make a partition for it so that i can keep my documents seperate, but that wouldn't be too hard to do.

This would then allow me to physically remove my old 40GB IDE. The reason being is that i have quite a decent system running on an X-Pro 400W PSU that has only 18amps on the 12v rail. (3800 X2 @ 2.5, 2GB RAM, x1950Pro, DVD-RW & SATAII drive) and im getting some instability at times at stock. Quite rarely, but i think i'm pushing it too its limits.

Would this make sense, or do you think i should keep the 40GB IDE just for a Windows install and keep the 500GB one just for my documents. My only worry is that if i cant get the SATA drive to be recognise in the WinXP installation then i will have to faff around and plug the 40GB back in. (if i decide to go back to XP)

Thanks for reading and any advice given.

Nathan. :)
 
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Personally I would partition the 500GB sata drive and install vista on that, put your docs on another partition, make sure you create a decent size partition because vista + programs take a lot more space than XP. I believe once you are using Vista you won't return to XP, it offers no benefits to go back imo.
 
I got a 500Gb at xmas and split it into 3, 30GB XP partition, 440Gb Data and 30Gb Vista Partition. I'm now finding my vista partition a bit snug and as its the last partition on the disk I cant extend it either :rolleyes:

Knowing what I know now I'd now put Vista in the first partition using around 40-50Gb and leave the rest for data.
 
If partitioning like this you should always leave a bit of space. say, 30 + 400 + 30 leaves 40 free, for extension later. Don't say you need it now as I'm sure you didn't install then dump 440GB of data on there. If you did you should've got a bigger drive anyway.
 
Nope, barely have over 20GB of data on my drive.

Think i may as well go ahead and partition it. :)
 
40GB is "Snug" yes for Vista, but, if used sensibly, its also plenty too!

I myself dont really use the My Docs folder that much... Sure, I save my docs and work to it, but then its always backed up to my F: each week, and anythign older than a month is moved off the C: unless its actually in use, and I dotn install a thing to C: at all unless its a system tool of some kind ( AntiVirus, Nero, WinAmp go on C: but at this time, nothing else is ) and I simply change the C:\Program Files\ to a D:\Program Files\ when I save everything else... This keeps my C: as clean as it possibly can be ( Cache files, Temp Files etc not included ) and hell, in XP64 I can defrag my C: in under 2 minutes - Vista takes ages annoyingly.

At this moment, my Vista64 PC is on a 34.4GB Partition ( Raptor 36 ) and has 18GB free.
 
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