Did I make a "booboo" re: partitions?

So I'm trying to do a clean install of Windows 7 on my new Seagate Momentus XP drive and Acer 3820T. I recalled installing Vista (or XP?) and being able to set partitions at the first install screen when installing the OS from scratch.

I figured that would be the case with Win7, but alas, I couldn't see anywhere to create partitions, so simply formated the drive and installed Win7. Then used the Win 7 Disk Management app in Control Panel to try and create a 50gig partition where the OS resides, but the smallest it would let me do is half the 500gb drive, claiming there were non-movable files on the disk (I also defragged right after installing Windows).

If I wanted to do a 50 gig (+ 2 50gig to 100gig "user" drives and the balance on a 4th partition for videos/music/etc., or whatever I decide to do), how do I go about doing this? I.e., is there a program one uses "Before" they install Windows 7 that I guess would be off of a bootable USB drive in my case to partition prior to installing?

Thanks!

One other Q, is there any reason for me to partition any of the drives as NTFS vs FAT?

 

To change partitions during Setup you need to first select “Custom (advanced)” for the Installation Type then click “Drive options (advanced)” to create, delete or resize partitions to your needs.

Stick with NTFS. It is journaled and most non-MS operating systems can read it out of the box now.

--L.

 

Odd, looks like I had to delete the initial partition on the install screen, then select "new" and select the size of the disks.

Also, there was no option to select FAT or NTFS? Strange no? In any event, Windows is now installing.

 

No not strange at all. You always want to use NTFS. It supports all the security permissions stuff, it is much less prone to problems in the event of a system crash or power failure etc. FAT is not supported by most utilities these days. I do have one FAT partition so I have a place to place Ghost images of my main C: partition when booting from a GHOST/PCDOS cd.

Gary

 

Why not just save yourself some trouble and organize your data in folders instead of partitions.

 

Because some of us are of the school that programs and data have different lifecyles and therefore need different backup maintenance procedures.

With only programs and os on one partition I can keep an image of those as a backup since I don't ever need to get to individual files. I only need to recreate that image every couple of months or so.

For my data (including my IE Favorites, Outlook PST files, everything) on my D: partition, I keep it backed up to two different places at all times. (One is on a external drive, the other is on a server, which gets backed up to tape daily. So technically that's three spots if you include the tape.) There I might (and sometimes do) need access to individual files and this stuff gets backed up daily.

That is not to say it is the ONLY way to treat programs/OS differently from your data, but just to make the point that the two should not be treated as a homogenous unit as most backup processes do. There are other ways to accomplish this. Partitons is just one way.

Gary