Partitioning Help

Is this a good way to partition a 200GB hard drive???

10GB for Windows
70GB for programs
120GB for Downloads (anime/music. i have alot)

Comments/agree/disagree?? What would you recommend?? I want a large portion ofmy Hard drive space to be dedicated for storing my anime/music files..

 

I've always used one partition for windows and programs. Then another one for my documents.

Just an idea: I think a thread about partitioning (advantages/disadvantages) and different suggestions would fit in this section and could be quite helpful.

 

Depends on how you need your partitions setup.
I'd go with at least 20GB for Windows (because Windows itself grows over time, and can easily hit 10-15GB, and some badly-coded installers refuse to install on drives different than the one Windows is installed on, or if there's not enough free space on the windows partition.

I'll admit my setup is a bit special (and some apps mistakenly believe that they're going to end up on the windows partition because of it), but I've found 25GB to be the smallest size I can get away with without any problems.

20GB should be enough in "normal" cases, 15 might be a close one, and 10 is just too little.

As for the rest? Why not put programs and data on the same partition? That way you don't have an artificial limit on how much space each can take. (what if you end up having filled up your programs partition, but having 40GB free on the data one? What do you do when you need to install a new program then?)

But it depends on what you need, and what you're planning for.
I could even ask, why do you want more than one partition in the first place? (Sure there are good reasons for it, but I'm not sure which one of them matters to you)

 

That's what I'm asking myself, really. I don't know, there's this trend about having "my documents" in another partition... But other than making for easier backups, or giving the possibility of reinstalling a clean OS without formatting the whole unit... is there any performance increase??

 

Not really. Nothing noticeable, at any rate.
It is mainly for the added structure/organization, and for making backups/reinstalls easier. both of these reasons are essential to me, but not everyone might bother.

 

Personally I'd agree with others here that 2 partitions is really fine, a majority of programs nowadays need to be installed to work (can't just run the program without installing it) as such if Windows Dies (the point of having windows separate) you really won't find any benefit to having the programs on a separate drive.

Second, take a look at how much space you REALLY need for programs, 70GB seems pretty large to me. I have 18GB for Windows and programs, and it works just fine, although I do need to reformat soon to get rid of garbage stuff but, 30GB would seem ample space unless you know you are going to be installing a ton of really large programs.

 

Hello,
what the best application for re-partition for windows Vista ?

Thanks

 

After reading everyones comments I decided to make only 2 partitions...

80GB for windows and programs
120GB for storage

I think this will work out fine for me. Thanks to all who replied.

 

Only use 1 partition. There is no reason in your situation to use more. Multiple partitions create artificial limits on what you can do with your space, and provide no effective advantage whatsoever. Any modern Windows OS keeps all of your documents and settings in their own folder, which is effectively exactly the same as keeping them in a separate partition. If you need to reinstall windows, backup that folder to an external drive.

 

Without hesitation I totally disagree, for a number of reasons. Using a separate partition for data is a well established practice with very real benefits. I actually have three partitions, one for the OS and programs, one for ALL data including MyFavorites, Outlook files etc. and the third has an image of my OS and programs partition. This setup allows a simple restore of the main partition from the image, without worry about losing data.

Now let's take the scenario you mentioned. What if you need to reinstall Windows because it won't boot? How do you backup the folder then? (Of course you OUGHT to have a backup of that folder anyway, but what if it's been a couple of days since the last backup?)

Yes multiple partitions do create a limit of what you can do with the space. But any good partitioning app lets you readjust that as needed. And the multiple partitions, most assuredly DO offer a very real advantage.

Gary

 

I beg to differ.
Suppose you installed your programs on a separate partition.
And supposte the programs you installed are written by people who do not like to put all their eggs in one basket. So in the program's folder you might find al the customization data due to several months of use by the user.
Suppose you backup the registry on a regular basis - daily, maybe at every reboot.

Now, the OS dies on you and you have to reinstall the OS
Ok, you still have to reinstall the application whose corpse is on the other partition. But if you rename the corpse before reinstalling in the same location, and if you swap the corpse with the revived - er... reinstalled - body of the application, all you will be missing are the data in the registry.

It's not that difficult to extract form the backup copy of the registry the branches with the customization. I did it to get back my color schemes in windows, my outlook preferences and more.

It takes a little time, but it's better than having to do the same customization again from scratch.

Moreover, if you use programs written by programmers that use their finger to code (and not their butts) you might also have all the data you need in the application folder. The application will work right away without having to fish data from the registry. Many nifty freeware utilities I downloaded from Sourceforge work like that. If you keep them in the OS partition you have to reinstall them all one by one.

To summarize:

A setup like this:

• 1 partition for the OS and the OS-complementing programs.
• 1 partition for the OS data (email, internet cache, newsgroups, dowloaded stuff, temp, desktop, sendto, startup menus)
• 1 partition for programs
• 1 partition for data

might give you real benefits in case of an OS reinstallation.

 

Well-established practices have a habit of continuing themselves, even when the need for them has long since passed.

If Windows won't boot, you have many options:

• You can boot to a windows cd (vista now has a full PE), and from there can fix the reason the system won't boot, repair windows, or copy any/all data to an external drive.
• You can reinstall windows completely without reformatting, so your data will still be there
• You can boot to a linux CD to get your data
• You can take the disk out and access it from another computer

I don't see that any of those options would be different if you have multiple partitions or not. If the reason you can't access anything is because the drive failed, then no option will help you, mine or yours.

If you need to keep a whole partition just to reimage the system frequently, I would reassess why you need to reimage so frequently and address that separately.

I agree that partitioning tools are much better than they used to be (but be careful because most of the older ones don't support Vista), but as a SysAdmin for almost 15 years, I have not seen much real compelling evidence on the benefits of multiple partitions versus the additional complexity.

 

What a perfect example of my point about unnecessary complexity!

 

LOL.
Well I've just recovered from the destruction not only of the partition table (rebuilt with test dsk) but also of the directory structure (file allocation table) of my C: disk on my old P4 in a matter of minutes.

Once the partition table had been rebuilt (I have copies of the MBR and of the partition data but I used testdisk nonetheless) all I had to do was to clone the last image of the C drive. It was 3 or 4 months old (I had not installed anything important from that point onward and it fitted on a CD).
I had everything up and running right after that, including the applications that write data in the registry. Office, for example. Since the image had been done after I had installed Office it had all the registry keys necessary for office to work.
My emails were there, my newsgroups were there, my web cache was still there, my bookmarks were there: updated to the last minute.
I did not have to reinstall office, firefox, my email program, input my account information, download firefox's extension (talking about people who code with their fingers - and brain). Nothing. Only a couple of programs I had updated after making the image needed some more care.

How would a single partition setup survive a missing directory structure, if not by restoring a full HD image?
How many DVDs do you need to image 160 GB? Can you trust the first backup before starting to go incremental? Or you backup everything every day?
Can you survive a partition table destruction and still having all your data till the last minute?

All I need to image is the relatively small OS partition after I've installed the more important applications. (I also have images of the programs partitions, but I never used them [1]). I do not need to update those daily. Just once in a while, when I make important customizations.
Only thing I backup daily (sometimes several times in a single day) are the "OSData" and "myDocs" partitions.

[1] My experience with Windows has shown that it's the OS partition the one that gets badly spoiled in case of disaster.

 

What caused the partition corruption?

 

As you might have grasped by now, there's no perfect setup. Depends 100% on your needs and preferences. In your case, I'd personally go with two partitions. One small one for Windows itself (call it 20GB), and the rest for programs and data. That way, you can instantly nuke the windows partition without needing to back up *anything*.

But that's how *I* would do it. A couple of people in this thread seem to disagree.

 

I think I got it. In my case, I will use my laptop basically for work. So in case of emergency, I'd like to recover as soon as possible.

C:\ I'll set the primary partition for XP pro.
D:\ And here, the two "documents and settings" and "programs" folders.

That way, in case you need a clean OS install, you can do it without reinstalling and configuring every single program you have, which can take a lot of time.

QUESTION: Will the new OS automatically understand and execute the pre-installed programs in the other partition?

 

what i did is, in vista, all of the "pictures/videos/documents" folders are in the user director.

I have a 200 gb hd, and i split it up so that 60 is vista + programs, and than another 60 (strictly documents/music) and final 60 (videos/pictures)
the 2 60 ones are just for data, i still keep al my programs/vista instaled in the same partition.

iv'e heard the benefit is that if ur vista dies, at least youll still have your music/movies/pics/documents (which is all i care about).
plus, i manually moved the locations of the user/pictures type folders into the different partition,, so they still show up as user/picture but the actual folder is on a seperate partition.

wheeeeeee

 

Nope, you'll need to reinstall them to make Windows "see" them.
But you'll have the files, at least. If they stored anything special like chat logs, playlists or special configuration files, you'll still have them.

 

Funny thing, I don't remember if I discovered the cause in this case.
All I know is that the image I made and mounted in Linux had a badly spoiled FAT: something had overwritten it along with the partition table.
It was (and still is, duh) a Windows 98SE installation, not a modern XP or Vista environment (despite all the bashing, they are way more stable that the toy OS I have on my P4 machine)

I do remember the causes of my previous partition disaster, though. It happened after installing the SCSI drivers for the CD-burner. Yes, my first CD burner, the one I had bought to backup everything on my hard disk .
I had to replace four diodes in my keyboard, shattered by my punching at it. :-(
My C partition was totally screwed along with the partition table. I was an inexperienced newbie at the time and had no linux partitions nor another OS partition to work on the problem. Nonetheless able to recovery my data in the last partitions (I had five at the time, IIRC) since their FATs were still untouched. I used a data recovery program in that case.
A subsequent google search had shown that other people had similar problems with the drivers from the same software house.

Now I have some 20+partitions in 4 disks, with one Windows clone on each disk (swapping a disk a making it active will put me up to work in 2 minutes flat - I used that feature once when one of my hard disks physically died) and two linux install in the other primary partitions (the fourth partition is an extended one).
Moreover, I can defrag only the disks I use the most (OSdata, myDocs) and keep the rest in perfect order.

 

If you reinstall Windows from scratch you'd have to reinstall every program that puts stuff in the Windows folder (such as DLLs) and data in the registry.
But if you image the OS partition AFTER you've installed all the programs you need for your work, you'd just need to restore that image and everything will work right away.
Remember to re-image the C: partition every time you do major changes to the OS or to the applications (like a Windows update, or moving to a new version of Office, or adding a new "major" program).

EDIT: Oh yes, another reason to keep programs on another partition is to make the OS backup smaller. In that case you could restore a program's functionality by hiding it's original folder, installing in the same location and wapping the newly installed folder with the older one.
Or you could image the program partition as well.

 

but what if the system drive crashes? then don't you use everything?
I had that happen before, not a good thing

 

Define "crashes". If the hard drive physically stops working correctly, it does not matter if you have your files on the C: or D: partition; the whole disk is dead. If you have some sort of file system corruption, then yes, it could cause a problem, but corruption like that is rare these days unless you are already doing something else unsafe, like repartitioning your drive using linux tools when you already have a vista partition, etc...

 

No, any application that changed the registry OR updated some files in the Windows directory (yes, some applications DO that) will no longer function after you reinstall the OS.

This is precisely why I suggest having one partition for the OS and the programs. The two are so intertwined it's not worth it to keep them on separate directories. As was mentioned elsewhere (and by me as well) instead of planning on reinstalling the OS, you should keep images of the OS and Programs partition. This is infinitely faster than reinstalling the OS and the Programs.

As to the person who asked if the had drive dies won't you lose everything, well duh, yes of course you will lose everything. Partitioning and imaging (on the same drive) are no substitution for good backup procedures, like imaging to DVD's, copying everything to an external drive or even the backup functionality built into SOME versions of Vista.

Gary

 

Guys plz explain how we can creat more than 1 partition in vista? I hav 120 GH HD and I need to creat another 1 or 2 partitions.I used the space shrink in Vista but It didn't work.Plz advice

 

Overall, I still prefer two drives, reason being I setup my drives, setup my software and then ghost the "main" drive (windows + programs) so no reinstalling for me.