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Partitioning

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9 replies

by jason9177

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i have a 20GB hard disk and intend to partition to C & D and load it with Windows 98.
is it better that the C drive is bigger than D?
will there be any different?

pls advised.

9 replies

by gigelul

There is not a rule. Personal I like to have on first partition all programs installed and on second partition the data (in situation of damage the OS I can reinstall it and data is safe on second partition). You must estimate the needed space on first partition + extra ~1Gb free space.

by gigelul

I see on others computer a separate partition for additional programs, but I don't find to be util this, because on computer with damaged OS this app also must be reinstalled. So if these app are on C (system partition) or on other partition no matter.
About cluster size, depends of files that you store on HDD. For many little files is good to have the small cluster size. For large files to prevent fragmentation is good a large cluster size.

by thechas

There is a good article on partitioning philosophy posted at www.aumha.org

Personally, the primary thing I watch in setting up drives and partitions is that I don't set up a drive that is just larger than the cluster size step.
Since fdisk oftenadds a few K to the drive size you specify, I use the following as drive size guidelines in FAT32 systems.
4090 MB
8085 MB
16375 MB
32760 MB

If you are using ntsf, (W2K, XP) the size steps are not as critical.

For systems that I set up forother people, I usually make the "C" drive the largest drive.
I then setup a D and E drive in the extended partition.
I save the D drive for virtual memory (swap file)
(2 - 4 GB)
I copy the OS CD. drivers, and critical update files onto the E drive.
I then install the OS from the E drive.
This way, I never need to use the OS CD to install updates or drivers.
I also don't need to bring along a bunch of CD's when I need to support the system.

On my personal system, I have the drives divided into multiple partitions
C OS and related programs
D Application programs
E Virtual Memory
F User Files
G Game programs
H Images and image editor programs
I Internet; Downloaded files and saved web pages.

This all started when I boughtmy first large drive, and was limited to 2GB per partition by W95.

Chas

by nise_k

Hi friend,

As has been rightly pointed out in the first answer, the space in C Drive (the OS always gets loaded into that only) should be sufficient enough for Windows as well as other programs to work with.

The best thing is to Install the S/Ws in C drive (because if C goes then all the other S/Ws are also useless). Keep the data and installable files in your D drive.

Also, create one more partition where in the future u could install S/Ws that you are not sure about. esp. S/Ws like Linux or Games. Keep this drive to somewhere around 2 GB.

Nise

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