80G Drive Partition

[jmodem]

I have a new T42P on the way. When it arrives I would like to partiton the 80G hard drive. I have not done this before so am looking for some help.

From what I have found so far it seems that Acronis, Bootit or Partition magic may be what is need to to make the partitions. What is recommended?

Any concerns that the disk has the IBM recovery partiton already? I don't want to touch that.

I don't plan to load a second OS. I just want to seperate the OS, programs and data and have a seperate partiton for media.

80G is a lot of space for me. Any suggetions on sizes for each partition? Does this make sense 10G for OS, 20G for programs, 20G for data, 20-30G for media.

Should I have a seperate paging file? I saw this suggested on one site but dont know why or how to do this.

Any suggestions and recommentation for software or links are welcome.

[gosha16]

i repartition usined partition magic and the installed linux/lilo, after this, my recovery partition was messed up. whether it was parition magic or lilo that did this i dont know but the point is it didnt work. this isnt a big deal since you can just use the recovery cds. parition worked great to repartition the drive though

[jdhurst]

On these newer machines (say, unlike a T30 or prior), the IBM stuff goes in the Predesktop Area. This is not a regular partition in the sense that you can use Partition Magic to reduce the Windows OS Partition and load the maximum number of partitions without hurting the Predesktop Area. There is an IBM Whitepaper on this, and it is a new technique.

I took a test drive on my T41 (the original 30Gb drive), re-imaged it, loaded Partition Magic 8, and loaded a Windows 98SE partition. When I was done, I could boot either partition and the Predesktop Area was fine. I did not try to load a Linux partition (I run Linux in VMware).

... JDHurst

[doolally]

Use Partition magic - and if you are using Win XP - put a partition in of at least 10 gigs for your operating system and essential software (ms office etc)

Whatever you do, don't get cocky and omit the recovery disks for partition magic - I did that once and regretted it bitterly for hours.

Would also recommend a copy of Norton Ghost to create a ghost image of your operating system when its up and running - any major hazzards down the line can then be remedied in 10 mins!

[gosha16]

as of the t42, it is it's own partition.