Do you partition your hard drive?

[douzi]

Just curious on what people do. I would like to do mine using PartitionMagic

[Torque]

No. On my thinkpad I settle for the C: drive.

On my desktop, I divided in into two partitions using the XP installer.

[tomc]

Yep, I have 2 partitions, one of 10Gb for Win and programs and the other of 27.2Gb for data

[Marc_G]

My needs are somewhat specialized, but this is what I do:

C:\ System and main programs. Compressed into an image via True Image, it fits on a single DVD for offsite backup.

D:\ Virtual machine images. Most people won't need this; I use Virtual MAchine technology to run WinNT etc. for work. These are large files and I wish to keep them separate from the main partitions.

E:\ Certain other work software is installed here, simply to keep the image size of the C:\ drive down.

F:\ I store my Lotus Notes databases here. These databases tend to be hundreds of MB each, totalling about 8 GB. For fragmentation-reduction purposes, I keep them in a separate partition. I rarely defrag this parttion.

G:\ Data. Pretty much every data file goes here.

H:\ Archive. I stick stuff here that doesn't need to be backed up during my routine backups.

I know I'm a bit "partition happy" but this all works for me. For backup, I routinely image one or more partitions at a time, as well as using BounceBack for weekly data file backups.

Marc

[kchung]

At my company, if it's Windows only, we do two partitions. If it's a 40 gig drive its 20 gb C and the rest D.

If the system is dual boot (Windows/Linux), it varies. There might be 2 or 3 partitions depending if there is space and/or if they're going to be using VMWare to. If it's 3 partitions on lets say a 60 gig drive, it could be 20 gb C, a small FAT32 D drive (5 gb) and the rest unformatted. Then install Linux, set up to use the unformatted space.

[douzi]

Thank you all for the information. I think i will do 2 partitions as well.

Another question, if I recover the system using the recovery discs, will the two partitions get blown away?

[furball4]

Not sure, and I'm interested to know too. I just resized the main partition on a new T42. I also changed the volume name of the windows partition. My guess is that it will handle it just fine: it probably uses whatever partition starts at the beginning of the drive or something.

[rgrosz]

Yes, it will destroy your new partition setup. I'm pretty sure the recovery discs restore your hard drive to appear the way it was originally.

[rgrosz]

Here is my partition layout:

Primary 1 - F: - Swap File
Primary 2 - C: - Windows
Primary 3 - N: - Virtual machine files
Extended - Everything else

I have used this standard drive letter layout over many years. I prefer to have separate drive letters, which allows me to back up selectively. I back up to an external 256 GB USB 2 drive.

C:\ System and programs I can't put on D:

D:\ Most program files

E:\ Most data files

F:\ Swap file

G:\ Subset of data files (only change these yearly)

H:\ Mounted drive letters for various network backup drives

N:\ Virtual machine files

[Nolonemo]

Desktop (dual boot):

Drive 1:

C: Win 98
E: Win XP
F: Programs (all apps that don't force installation to default location)
G: Games
I: Misc (temp and scratch disk, downloads, etc)
J: Data

Drive 2:

D: Capture (video capture and rendering area)
K: Music

Thinkpad:

C: WinXP
F: Programs
I: Misc
J: Data (mapped network drive, set available offline)

This system is really an artifact from pre-XP rollback days. (Also from DOS days, when I was using Norton Commander as my interface, so cleaner directory/file organization was required than you need now, when you can just dump programs in and Windows will keep track of it for you) The theory was that if a system file became corrupted, buggering the system, I could just restore the OS partition, which was relatively small and easy to backup. The Data partition is automatically mirrored to the D: drive on shutdown so there's always a current data backup.