Partitioning

[Darkandlight]

I've never actually partitioned a hard drive, so I was wondering how to do it. What exactly are the advantages of partitioning it as opposed to not doing it?

[morriswindgate]

Partitioning a disk has definite advantages when using larger drives (over 20 gigs). First, all you need to load the operating system and programs is 6 to 10 gigs (maybe 15 if you are a big gamer). Then you break the rest of the disk into another partition and break it down into logical drives. These you use like seperate hard drives for file storage or even loading more games and programs.
Advantages are that C drive is the one most likly to get corrupted, so by having saved info and downloads on the other partition you don't lose them if you have to do a full reload. It also takes less time to defrag the C drive since it is not the full disk. And finally the logical drives give you a place to store an image of the C Drive, which if you keep it upto date will allow you to quickly get rid of a suspected infection. (Last night I was having trouble getting one of my computers to startup and when I did it it to go into windows my firewall notified me that it was trying to log onto ICQ, which I do not use. So I reloaded my image, and in 10 minutes everything was back and normal)
How to do it> Well if you are using XP you do it through Administrator Tools or you can do it the old fashion way as explained at the link below.

http://fdisk.radified.com/