hard drive settings... advice needed

undefinedundefinedundefinedHi Folks,not sure if this is the right place for this but anyway, I'm just about to start my first PC build and wondered if anyone could advise me about setting up the hard drive. I'm using a seagate 80GB and will be installing XP Home, I'm interested to know about the best way to set up the hard drive with regard to partitions and back up facilities. If anyone can give me any advice ( suitable for a newbie like me to follow lol ) or direct me to an article about this I'd be very grateful. I'll be selling the PC to a good mate of mine so I need to get it right lol, Regards Beech

 

Well theres two common ways to set up a partition for WIndows, just format one giant partition which I believe is most common, or make a smaller partition (15 gigs or so) and the rest on a bigger partition. the Smaller partition just gets the O/S installed on it and smaller software while bigger software and files are kept on the big partition. This way if he ever needs to format he wont have to worry about losing the files on the second partiton, only the first.

 

Following on from Wookie I would be inclined to do 4 partitions. Put your Windows XP in one - say 15 Gbs, put an image in another with appropriate imaging software, put all other programs in the third, and all your personal stuff like letters photos and etc in the 4th. How you split them is very much up to your customer. Four splits makes for faster defragging plus eases the tension on your OS when things go pearshaped. That said always always send your personal stuff to a CD rom or other external media if the HD craps itself. In the case of Seagate that would be very rare - it has never failed me yet.
I now bow to all others - the sum of which will tell you the way to go.
Robert

 

Wookie, I do exactly what Robert posted and I add a 5th partition that I use as a sandbox for Internet related applications. This keeps programs that inherently use the Internet, i.e. chat, file swapping, web spiders, browsers etc. in their own partition. I can designate a separate virus scan for that partition, which runs faster, due to less files. If things get really mucked up in there I just flat-line it and reinstall the image I backed up.

 

Heres how I have my system from a windows perspective.

C: 20 Gigs for Windows apps and Windows NTFS
d: 20 gigs seperate HDD for back up NTFS
e: 80 Gigs for all my personal files and games NTFS
f: 4 gigs fat32 for file transfer to and from Linux

Linux Perspective

/ 17 gigs for my Linux partition
/swap 700 Megs for my Linux wap
/windows/C
/windows/D
/windows/E
/windows/F