Partion My Hard Drive

I am getting a new T500 with a 250 GB hard drive. I was planning on partitioning it but I don't really know what the use is. What should I put on each partition and how big should they be? I heard that you could put all of your program and OS files onto one of the partitions so that if your computer crashed you could bring it back with that partition? If I can do that how is it done? Also if I do partition my hard drive will I have to partition my external hard drive to back it up? Are there any easy solutions? Thanks for your help!

 

Generally most folks will use two partitions, one for their OS/Programs and the other for their data - documents and the like. That way, if the OS gets bunged up and they need to do a clean install, there is little or no risk to losing their documents and whatnot.

Basically, you'll probably get a c:\ partition (the System partition) and a d:\ partition (the Recovery partition). From there, you would generally lop off some of the unused space on the c:\ partition, and use it to create a new partition (say, f:\ - e:\ is usually already assigned to your optical drive).

If, God forbid, you should have to do a recovery installation from the recovery partition, that recovery installation should just be done into the then-existing c:\ partition, without disturbing any of the other partitions.

No, you won't have to partition the external hdd you plan on using for backups.