Partitions

[joroma]

I am in the process of doing a fresh install of XP and in a seprate thread on a different topic there was a suggestion of having a 20gb Partition for XP and moving My Documents folder to a different partition. I will have a 160gb hard drive so what is the best/safest way of setting my PC up?

I will have 2 160GB SATA Drives so could look at a Raid set up but I don't really want to get to complicated and I like to have a seperate HD to back everything on to (especially my photos!).

 

[joroma]

I can see the benefit in having several partitions but does it cause any problems eg itunes, photoshop on C:drive but music and photo files are on D: or E: drive?? By separating programmes and documents on the same drive but on different partitions mean that I can reformat the C: part of the drive and reinstall windows without affecting all my document and photo files that are on the D: part of the same drive? Sorry if its a silly question!

What is a page file?

 

[joroma]

Right thanks for the advice guys. I'll think about what partitions I'll have. Do I partition the drive as I install windows or using disk manager after the install? Which is easiest?