Hi Don,
I'm finally getting to your questions. Sorry about the delay.
There's lots of different approaches to partitioning. My partition schemes change occasionally, but for me the fundamental idea is to dual boot operating systems, and to store images on a separate partition. At the moment, I have 4 partitions for my 40gb drive. I'm still dual booting, so one is for win98, and another for XP. Eventually I'll can 98, but I did use it just the other day when XP booted mute. It took a reinstall to fix, but I was able to work normally before I could find the time to reinstall XP.
I put installed applications on the same drives as the operating systems they are installed on. My thinking is that I want an image that can restore the operating system, registry and programs in one shot.
My largest partition, 20gb, is for data. And the last one is for backed up files and images. It's been a bit of a chore to keep up with expanding partition sizes. XP has a way of hogging more disk space than you ever thought it could. I've got 5gb set aside for XP and applications.
You probably saw the bosquedog's post linking to Mr. Mark's treatment of the subject. Be sure to read it. The object is to come up with a partitioning scheme that fits your computing style.
Partition Magic 6.0 will work fine, UNLESS you have converted to NTFS, provided you run it from dos diskettes. You should be able to make disks to run it from even if you downloaded it. Or try BootIT NG. 30 day free trial for the shareware, works with XP. But you can start out partitioning the new drive with Fdisk. It's resizing partitions without losing data that you need partition software for.
BTW, NTFS has been a much discussed topic on the XP microsoft newsgroup. Seems there are still lots of FAT32 aficianados. Compatibility reasons. And speed reasons, though this is controversial. NTFS wins for compression and security. For anyone interested, here's a few messages from the newsgroup thread on this topic: groups.google.com
Good luck with your new hard drive.
Esteban |
