Partitioning XP

[BoB_DoG]

With larger hard drives I have been thinking about splitting up my space into seperate areas. I was thinking somewhere along the lines of:

10 Gig Windows disk
10 Gig Applications Disk
10 Gig Games Disk
90 Gig Crap Disk

80 Gig Movies Disk
40 Gig MP3

on two seperate 120 gig disks.

This would improve defragging, and as the second of the two disks would contain all my network shared files, would stop my computer from slowing down when people accessed my data over the network (Im on a university windows network, and we share a lot of stuff).

I realise that microsoft doesnt reccomend this, wbut i think it would be useful.

Any opinions would be great, and also any help on installing windows in these conditions would be useful too (I mean, I know a partition can be mounted as a subdirectory of another drive in XP, so how could I partition upon install a 10 gigabyte drive, and mount it as the c:/windows directory?)


Anyway, thanks in advance guys/gals

[directhex]

you don't really want to mount a drive as c:\windows, but you can mount, say, \ partition as c:\junk

to do it, right click on my computer once windows is installed, choose manage, change to disk manager, right click on a partition, choose Change Drive Letters & Paths, Add, then the folder you want to mount into. This only works with NTFS.

to get there in the first place the XP installer is as good a partition creator as any, just select unpartitioned space, hit C to create a partition, choose its size. when you have all your partitions created hit enter on the first one (i.e. the one you want to install to), and format as ntfs when asked. format the rest from within windows once you're installed.

[Blub2k]

If you are going to put two 120gb drives in there and play games etc then I would make a raid0 array out of them for speed. Although it would be better to have a smaller seperate disk for the OS in raid mode so it is not booting off the raid array.
The splits you are thinking of will turn out to be very restrictive in my experience, especially if you have a lot of games, 10gb these days can easily filled by three full installs and with that amount of drive who does not want to do full installs. Personally I split my disks into
OS:6gb
Keeper/data: 10gb
Install: rest
That way when windows messes up as it always inevitably does then you can just format c: and reinstall, you will also find that a lot of your installed stuff can be run straight away without reinstalling from the install drive, where it does not work then you just install on top again. The problem with so many "hard" partitions is that you will likely be out and about with PQmagic at some stage to increase drive sizes. The handier way is just to use folders which are easily changed.

[Anders]

I agree with Blub2K that 10 GB is unlikely to be enough for games. I suppose if you only play a few games or old games then it is not inconceivable. What do you need 90GB of crap for?

Not sure about the RAID 0, you should see better performance. However this involves no redundancy (so it really is AID 0 ) meaning the failure of one disk will destroy the array and thus the data on both disks.

I would suggest the partitions: Disk 1 = Windows OS - 10GB, Temp (Windows temp directories, swap/page file, etc.) - 10GB, Installation (Games, Apps, etc.) - 100GB; Disk 2 = My Documents - 10GB, Storage (MP3s, Movies, Patches, etc.) 110GB

Putting the Windows Temp folders on a separate partition should keep fragmentation lower on the other drives.

Are you just going with one OS BoB_DoG?

What do you use the "keeper/data" partition for Blub2k?

[Steve]

Just for reference - here's my partition setup:

[BoB_DoG]

cheers guys for the info, I think im gonna stick with a 10 gig windows disk, then a 50 gig applications, and then use the rest as space for files etc.

Im unsure about raid, as it would be preferable to serve network folders from one hard disk, and have all the applications and pagefiles on a seperate physical disk.

if anyone strongly disagrees, or has a better solution (raid or not), please show some interest and post.

cheers