Partition's, i am about to try

I currently have a 20gb hdd (is pretty much full) which im running win xp home ed on. I am about to install a 200gb hdd, my plan is to partition the 200gb hdd in five 40gb drives and run xp off one of them and have the old 20gb drive as a backup for important info.
I haven't done partitioning before and was looking for a bit of advice, i read somewhere that i should format in NTFS instead of FAT.
i have downloaded both Ranish Partition Manager 2.44 Beta and SwissKnife 3.09 in the hope either will be able to do the job.
my plan was to install the 200gb hdd as a slave and to the partitioning from my current setup then swap the 200gb hdd to master and reinstall everythingon that drive

 

All HDD manufactures have Free Utilities to Format & Partition there HDD's, if you buy retail HDD the utility comes with em.
Most are also avaible here at MG on the front page.
Maxtor is MaxBlast
WD is Data LifeGuard Tools
Seagate is Seatools
If you use one of those utilities go to HDD setup/Advanced (Using one the HDD manufactures utilities is probably the best way & the simplest!)
You can also use XP CD.

You can only have up to 4 Primary partitions.
Use NTFS file system, NTFS is better, more secure, more efficient.

 

thanks

 

As per ASUS, you can only have 4 partitions. Do not partition them equally as some partitions will be too big. Some may eventually be too small.

Check out threads

http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=63971

and http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=64582

for ideas I have implemented on my 30gig Hardrive in my laptop.
Your sizes will be different, of course, because your harddrive is much bigger.


Use similar proportion percentages on your big drive. Works for me. Especially the KEEPER and TESTING Folders, on different partitions. You then only keep stuff you actually USE. Every time you go to TESTING, it shows you the programs your downloaded to test, and you may or may not wish to "KEEPER" them. Hope this stirs some ideas for you. Bazza

===

 

Thanks guys, they were out of stock of 200gb drives so i got a 250gb instead, was able to use xp to partition the drive an all went smoothly. Only prob was the time taken to update norton internet security over a dialup conection, was bout 55mb of updates and i havnt even got to the windows updates yet either which i thinking wont be all that small even though i got service pack 2.

any chance you know how to import outlook express files from my old drive to the new install on the new drive?

 

My only question here is why? Why partition the drive at all?

 

Read this article I've found

Originally from http://castlecops.com/t122354-Why_should_I_partitioning_my_hard_disk_drives.html

Google helped (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&...oning+my+hard+disk+drives?&btnG=Google+Search)

 

Or perhaps acronis is just trying to sell their product.

 

In reply to the e fool, my reason for partitioning is the time it takes to perform maintenance like defragmenting a single large drive, by partitioning it i can do a section at a time. i wasnt aware of the other advantages listed at http://castlecops.com/t122354-Why_should_I_partitioning_my_hard_disk_drives.html an now see them as an added bonus

Thanks D3m3nt3d il give it a shot

 

Well, my opinions are a bit different on this. That is about all I want to say. Have fun!

 

Thanks D3m3nt3d, i was succesful in copying over outlook files, i used info from the link u left, as i had had trouble finding were the files were stored and wat format they were in. All sorted an working well.