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Purpose of programme partitioning

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Further to my last post I have another query.

If i partition the c: drive twice, one for xp and one for the programs, is there any benefit in the speed and reliability. Given that even if the programs do go on D: a lot of stuff will be dumped in to the Windows folder and the registry.

If the drive is partitoned, is there a ghost program which will backup and restore the entire disk including partitions in one go? or does it have to be on a per partition basis?
My idea is that if I get problems for whatever reason with the OS files I can simply re-ghost the partiton (or drive) and be back up and running quicker than i would be if i tried to troubleshoot.
Is it better just to let both the OS and the programs install on C: ?

Is it possible to ghost a machine remotely over the Internet? Or another restore method?

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Reply To: Purpose of programme partitioning

In reply to Purpose of programme partitioning

There are pros/cons to either situation. If you are planning to have an image setup then partioning is not a huge deal in my opinion. Ghost however will handle partions seperatly if you want it to. It can ghost the whole disk with partions intact or just on e of them at a time. When dealing with just one hard drive that is partioned I dont think there is much gained in performance, in fact you might lose a little since the info is still having to be pulled from the same physical drive. The main idea for partitioning nowadays is for security and seperating data from OS. I typically dont sepearte progams from the OS partition as in my experiances it seems to be a hassle if something does go wrong. Just my opinion in that regard though. I personally save partitions for just seperating data out.

As far as ghosting(imaging) over the internet, that is a bad idea. With XP you are looking at bare minimum of 1.5 gigs. Realisticly its going to be closer to 3gigs min. especially with office and other apps on it. That is way to much to push through the internet unless you are talking dedicated highspeed(WAN) lines. It is much better to keep it within your LAN or better yet to keep it with one phyical location.

Just my generalization and opinion on the matter.

hth

Jason

Reply To: Purpose of programme partitioning

In reply to Purpose of programme partitioning

I can see the benefit of putting data and programs on seperate partitions but not necessarily os and programs on different partitions unless C: was small to start off with.

Reply To: Purpose of programme partitioning

In reply to Purpose of programme partitioning

This is gonna bring out the wolves!

You are not gonna get any benefit from what you are planning on doing.

You get speed from faster drives. 7200 to 15000 rpm drives.

Drive partition is a carry over from the days when the os could not handle more than a fixed amount of files on a partition.

Drive size grew faster than the os ability to deal with it.

Remember you can have 100 partitions on a drive, but when the drive dies they are all dead.

Others used partitions to isolate data from the os, not programs.

Load your main drive will xp and your programs. Now do a partition backup of this drive. There are several programs that will do this and save it to cd, dvd or over the network to another machine.

You would only need to update this image when you install or delete programs.

Buy yourself a second drive. Use this drive for data and documents. This backup needs to be done, well decide what are you willing to loose?

Good Luck

Lee

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