Partitioning OS On Separate Drive Partition

[Harry]

Some of you have recommended putting the OS on a separate partition from your installed programs and it's true that putting your operating system on one drive will lead to faster disk scanning, analysis and defragmentation but I wonder about other things too.

It seems like if you put just your operating system on one drive partition and then at some point reformat that partition, all the programs that you would have installed from another partition or partitions will have to be deleted as well because if you just leave them there, over time, what will happen is that there might end up being utter confusion as to what programs are installed with Windows and what programs were left over from the reformatting. The difference is that if the installed programs were on the same drive partition as the OS, they would also have been immediately wiped clean on the reformat and there would be no confusion later on.

The other thing is that for a backup ghost or drive image, you will have to ghost two partition drives, your OS drive and your installed programs drive. I don't know for sure whether this could lead to more confusion or not but it seems like it would.

[kraken]

Harry

If windows don't know about it, it can't be confused by it. If you have a program on a seperate partition and you reformat the OS partition and reinstall windows, then....

Windows will not know about the old program on the other partition. When you do a fresh install of windows, windows does not scan other drives for programs that you have not told it about. You can however reinstall those programs over the top of themselves, which usually saves any data and settings you have with them, while reinforming windows that they exist.

Saving a copy of the registry (system.dat, user.dat) and copying over the new clean registry will restore all your old windows settings (except those in sys.ini, win.ini, config.sys, autoexec.bat) You can also save a copy of these from your old OS to refresh windows with all your old settings.

Partitioning disks is a personal preferrence with anyway you choose to manage them. One big or twenty small its all up to you. I have six partitions on one 8.4Gb drive (seven if you count the linux which can't be seen by windows), My main reason for this is because I treat my hard drive like the drawers of a filing cabinet. I have one partion for each of my main applications, One for CorelDraw, One for my office suite, One for Web applications, etc, And of course one for my OS. I also have an old 2Gb drive with 2 partitions ,His and Hers for files.

[madthumbs]

If you do use the partitioning beware of any registry cleaners from McAfee, or any of their software for that matter. As a gamer I regret partitioning one of my 20gig drives into 5 partitions. I have a game that is 2gigs installed. I can see myself ending up with a lot of wasted space on each partion as each is near it's capacity. Suppose you get a game like Quake 3 and start adding bots, skins, levels and hit a limitation on the drive it's on also.

[HAL9000]

It's a personal preference thing really. I have my 20Gb drive broken down into 5 partitions. WinME is on C by itself, so should I get desparate enough to format, I don't lose anything by forgetting to back something up. I keep D:\ for all my games, E:\ for my documents, F:\ for my programs, G:\ I keep blank for temp storage, CD-Recording, Time shift TV, etc. I am starting to need more room on my blank drive (3Gb just isn't enough once you start playing with the AIW Radeon), so soon I might look into another drive. A bit of a juggling act to keep the drive letter assignments, but if you watch what you're doing it's not a big deal.

If you think that multiple drive letters will confuse you (don't worry about Windows), then stay with a single drive letter. If you're new to the partitioning game, give the OS it's own partition and put everything else on a second partition. Then if you need to blow away your C:\ drive, you can do so without losing data. Keep in mind that you will still have to reload the programs to restore DLL's, fonts, shortcuts, etc.