Partitioning New WD HD

[haggisinlondon]

Hi

I finally have all the parts for my first time build. My current machine has a 40gb drive which I partitioned into 15/15/10 for Windows, application and games respectively. I think I gave too much to windows.

I have a new 120gb WD SE for my new machine and was wondering how best to partition it. What are peoples views on partitioning, would it help me to stick my swap file on a seperate partition?

Thanks

[morriswindgate]

I just did one this way, 15/60/30/15. 15 is way more than you will ever use for a C Drive.
IMHO = Leave the swap file alone.

[chip]

I was under the impression that there was a maximum size the Windows OS partition could be, something like 8GB. Is this not true?

[karl.pestell]

Right, this may be abit of a thick question, but ive never ha to partition my hard drive previously, what is the best way of doing it if I have some stuff on the hard drive at present or is it not possible to do it when the hard drive has some stuff on?

Some people have talked about Partition Magic etc but I dont know what I need.

Thanks for any help

[mike breck]

karl.pestell

Usually partitioning in Win9x or W2K/XP means detroying any data on the partitions. However, Partition Magic will allow you to "resize" partitions and reallocate space on the HD, without any data loss.

chip

There are BIOS limitations and Windows OS limitations (really FAT limitations). If we're only talking about Windows, then when Win95a first came out it was mooted that it could only cope with an 8.4Gb HD. Microsoft said later that this was really 32GB - but the HD had to split into 2.1GB partitions. This was because it was FAT16.

Win95b, Win98, WinMe are all FAT32 and can theoretically handle HDs and partitions of up to 2 Terabytes.

WinW2K/XP will not allow formatting of a drive larger than 32 GB using the FAT32 file system using their format utility. However, it can be done by formatting HD with good old FDISK beforehand.

However you can format large single partitions of up 137GB in W2K/XP if you use NTFS.

The common "BIOS" limitations are 8.4GB , 33.6GB, and 134.4GB.

So it was either the Win95a FAT16 or 8.4GB Bios limtation you have read about. But things have moved on a bit since then.

:)

[chip]

Thanks Mike. I'm guessing it's my BIOS that's limiting me. I'm using FAT32 on both XP and 98SE.

[haggisinlondon]

mike breck

As I am doing a complete new install of XP on my new machine. Should I use fdisk to setup my partition or should I setup the partitions in the Xp setup. I am using ntfs for my drive.

Does it make a difference?

[bailey]

no xp will do what you need

[mike breck]

Hi Haggis,

As bailey said, no problem if you are using NTFS. It would only be a problem if you are trying to format a partition greater than 32GB in XP setup using FAT32.

As far as partitioning is concerned, I would tend make a partition for the OS, one for third-party "serious" programs, one for games, and very importantly, one just for data.

Regarding the Page File, I've know people who have left it to Windows, put it on a separate partition, or put one on each partition. The trouble is, I've not heard of anyone jumping up and down for joy, saying they've found the "perfect" method which gives an incredible performance boost.

So morris might be right, when he says, just leave it to Windows. At the very least, you might set a minimum and maximum size.

With Win9x, putting the swap file on a small, separate partition, did help to reduce fragmentation. Perhaps there is still some merit to this in XP.

Experiment and see what works best for "your" system.

HTH

[glc]

With NT/2K/XP, setting the pagefile to the same min and max sizes will eliminate fragmentation.