WinXP despair

Can WinXP Home be persuaded to boot from its own partition and to recognize another partition for storing/retrieving data? I have reinstalled O/S- following (another) disaster- to a 5Gb partition whilst creating a 115Gb second partition. I am constantly told disk space is critically low and I do not know how to proceed from there - all manuals strangely silent on boot partitions. Any help greatly appreciated.

 

Good morning, Somean, welcome to Major Geeks.

Creating separate data and program partitions is a good idea as your post implies you have discovered the hard way.

Have you also got your program files installed on the 5G Windows partition?

However I don't think you have the balance of resources quite right. The arithmetic is as follows:

Windows XP itself occupies between 1 and 2 GB of hard drive space.
The swop or page file it creates occupies between 1 and 2 GB of hard drive space.
If you have hibernation enabled the hibernation file occupies between 1 and 2 GB of hard drive space.
Installed Program files occupy between 1/2 and 2 GB of hard drive space.
On top of this windows only works effieciently in a hard drive that is less than half full. some programs are even worse, especially if you are low and RAM as the hard drive is then used more intensively.

If you are going to burn DVDs you need somewhere to hold the image file, 5G for single layer up to 10 G for double.

This all adds up to Windows XP needing a partition in the 20G to 40G range.

This should still leave you a substantial data partition, even for a large music collection.

I usually advocate three partitions as minimum. One for Windows and programs, one I call workspace and one for permanent data. This makes backup and maintenance easy as the first two change often and need more cleanup and defragging.

Hope this helps

 

Many thanks, studiot. It is a great help. I have two hard drives installed - result of earlier still disaster - one 120Gb currently master, the other 250Gb the slave; so would it be a good idea to devote the smaller HDD which holds the O/S solely to the O/S and other things you mentioned? Then use the second solely for data? Should I reformat the 120 Gb HDD and reinstall?

 

You don't necessarily need to reinstall. There are both commercial programs (partition magic) and freeware (at major geeks) that will resize your partitions for you. P Magic is not expensive and worth every penny, but no use for Vista.

Tell us what you need all this data space to store and i will advise. There are differenct approaches to partitioning depending upon what you do. Video editing is very different from say a large photo database.

 

That's good news, studiot. I have Partition Magic already (my wife purchased three licences) and yes my program files are installed on the 5Gb partition. I had hoped to keep the O/S entirely separate but this seems impossible. I added the second HDD to rescue this stuff earlier this year and went for the most economic option. The storage is mostly an accumulation of correspondence and .jpegs over ten years of usage plus increasing but not always timely attempts to back-up. Video editing hasn't happened yet. Offspring has a lot of homework and coursework projects etc so really just family stuff.

 

My XP is on a 10GB partition, and I have a 20GB partition for my program files. The only programs that won't load to a different partition are MS ones, the rest usually give you an option of where you'ld like to install them. It's a great way to ensure that you won't lose too much if XP stuffs up for any reason and you have to reformat. I haven't lost a single byte yet from reformats or nastier issues.

 

Augie it's interesting that you hail from the same place as one of the two programs I know about that have to have a place on the C drive. I mean Corel Draw. (The other is Keyoptimiser). Microsoft stuff will cheerfully load onto another drive.

There is little point separating programs from Windows as you have to reinstall most of them after a windows reformat anyway.