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Pastimes : Dream Machine ( Build your own PC ) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Spots who wrote (5737)	1/31/1999 2:08:00 PM
From: Zeuspaul	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14778

Let's be careful because I have needs and priorities different from yours, so it would be easy to get at cross-purposes to no purpose. No use to disagree for different needs. Agreed. I agree on partitions. The fewer the better. If I could arrange it I would have one on each hard drive. I run NT as my primary OS, so NTFS is my preferred file system, both for size and for other features (compression, security). My agreement is limited to partitions seen by an operating system. If a partition is hidden and does not affect drive lettering it is not a concern for me. I have hidden partitions on several machines that have caused me no grief yet. I am still waiting for Dave to remember what it is about hidden partitions he does not like. One caveat is the dependence on PowerQuest Partition Magic and Drive Image programs. For me they have become essential utilities. My preference is not to hide anything. However if it provides some kind of temporary benefit I have not yet seen the downside wrt to partition/system design. It is essential for me to be able to boot Win 95/98 (currently 95) as a test bed for developed software and other purposes. I'm ignoring boot disk switching in the bios till I have confidence it will be available on any machine I ever get. If you can control the machines you get bios boot selection will be around for awhile IMO. It is not universally available and probably never will be. I believe Intel mainboards/bios have the option. When Dell implements an Intel board the bios option seems to disappear. I feel confident that a non software boot selection is a viable alternative that will be around for awhile. I know of three alternatives. 1) My current favorite. Two IDE drives with boot selection from the mobo bios. 2) SCSI boot drive selection from SCSI bios. Available in Adaptec AHA2940 ( I have used this one successfully) and others. The Mylex bt930 has boot target ID. It seems to be more prevalent than it used to be. I prefer an IDE based system because of the significant cost savings and the ease of configuration. 3)Removable harddrive. This is the 'don't try to mess with me' approach. I have not given much thought to this concept yet. IMO it gives me the most control over anything hardware and software developers may throw at me in the future. It is a plan B concept to the KOT bios boot selection idea. System design would be the same as for a bios boot selection design. The methodology would change for drive selection. One would need two removable drive bays. For frequent booting between alternate OSes the above may not be a best solution. Bios boot selection is rather simple IMO but not as simple as selecting the OS from the NT OS loader or a boot manager from a users point of view. If one is trying to maintain independent systems my preference is for a selection prior to an OS load. I'm ignoring boot disk switching in the bios till I have confidence it will be available on any machine I ever get. Under this restraint, to boot 95 at all I need FAT16 or FAT32 for the C partition. FAT32 is useless to me, as I use 95 only for testing (I'm not really a gamer<g>), and besides NT can't access it, so by elimination it's FAT16. That means the C partition is small. It also means the FAT16 partition must be the first active partition on the first drive, which in turn means it will be the partition NT boots from. So it looks like we agree that one large C drive is preferable for the primary OS load/installation barring significant over ruling factors. The only way I can see around this conclusion is to use a boot manager. That may be necessary, but unless there's no other way, I will not use one because: I am with you on boot managers. For me they are a last resort. I will probably have to implement some at work as I have limited control over hardware selection. but it doesn't address anything but the C partition! Sounds good to me. Without a self imposed restriction on bios boot selection all I have is C. If I boot my second OS it is C and If I boot my primary OS it is C. There are other drive letters involved but they are inconsequential wrt to OS operations. ie The OS and its associative applications are contained in one partition. At minimum there will need to be a second partition on the second drive to create and restore drive images. Zeuspaul