Help! I've never partitioned a drive
 

Greetings,


I'm (finally) getting a new hard drive. I'm getting a Seagate 1TB drive. It will be the only drive in the desktop PC, so I need to install my OS (Win XP Pro), all my programs, and files. I'm looking for advice on:

1. How to do it--I'm paranoid I'll make a mistake since I'm a newbie!
2. How many partitions?
3. What size partition for OS, programs, pagefile, files, etc.

Any help would be much appreciated!

If you have the OS disc, it'll partition it and just ask you for a general size..

I usually go for 25-30GB for the OS.

I do have the OS discs, so I'll make two partitions--one 30GB for the OS and the rest for data? Should I make a third or fourth partition for programs and /or pagefile?

Thank you for your help!

If you have enough space (which you do... damn, I wish laptops had drives that big!), I would recommend just letting programs install on the C drive by default. Keeps things nice and organized. A swap space (pagefile) partition should be about 3 GB, for error room, and is definitely a good idea.

Thank you also Audiophile! It does seem like laptop drives get larger more slowly than desktop! My laptop has an 80GB drive and I think the max available is 250GB?

OK, so the plan so far is:

Three Partitions:

1. 30GB for OS and Programs

2. 3GB for Pagefile (should I make it larger if I have 4GB of ram?)

3. The rest for data

So my next question is, how do I "tell" Windows XP Pro to use the 3GB partition for Pagefile?

Thank you!

After the OS install is complete, right click My Computer:
Choose Properties
Choose the "Advanced" tab
Under "Performance" click "Settings"
Click the "Advanced" tab, click the "Change" button under the "Virtual Memory" heading
Now, a new window will pop up. You can choose to have the page file on C:\ or anywhere else. Your choice.
Under size, put 3000 for both min and max size.
Click "OK" in all three windows to exit out of them.

Done.

^-^,

Thank you very much for your clear and complete instructions for the pagefile! This is very helpful and I appreciate you taking the time to help!

Anytime.

Actually, the pagefile is what the system uses when it runs out of RAM, She Loves Piano. So, it isn't really necessary to have it any bigger than ~3 GBs. It's just slightly faster than loading everything one-by-one in the CPU if you run out of RAM.

(And I wish I could have a 250 Gig hard drive. The highest one with my connectors is 160 :p).

Depending on whether or not you game (new games require upwards of 4gb of install space) and whether you use new programs (newest versions of Office and Nero, for example, require a ridiculous amount of hard drive space, especially Nero 8, in the magnitude of a full 1gb), I would make the OS partition much larger than 30gb. Also, if you want to keep your options open for a possible future Vista upgrade, remember that that OS alone can eat up over 12gb of hard drive space.

Also, a separate partition for the pagefile may not be necessary, or even beneficial. A quick Google of "pagefile vs pagefile partition" shows this result (Pagefile partition - nV News Forums) where some users actually report that a separate partition for the pagefile in XP harms performance. It is definitely a fact that placing the pagefile partition at the end of the hard drive would reduce performance as the drive would have to seek longer, which is not what you're planning on doing, but I myself would recommend you leave the pagefile on the C drive.

If you've already made your partitions, you can use Acronis Disk Director to resize your partitions, something Windows can't do. If you can't find it and need it, give me a shout and I can get it to you.

To maximise a drive's performance, do not make unnecessary partitions; if you're installing a different OS, then partitioning would be inevitable. Keep all your data on the same partition and use folders to organise them.

For open source alternatives, consider using GParted which is available as a liveCD on its own or more multipurpose distros such as SysRescueCD.

It's also a good thing to partition the OS in a specific partition, if you tend to need to reinstall your OS on a frequent basis. I tend to reinstall WinXP about every 9months, because of hardware upgrades or because of Windows registry clogging up. Having seperate partitions on a single drive is GREAT if this is a common occurence, because you don't have to backup the whole HD to do a from scratch reinstall.

30GB for OS partition under windows xp? Damn!

The OS partition should be as small as it could be. The reason is fragmentation of files. After a few weeks without defragmenting files are divided into parts laying in different areas of partition. To read a whole file HDD's head has to find every "piece" of that file. Bigger partition=longer jumps of the head=longer file reading.

Depending on other software, I suggest keeping the OS partition as small as it possible. I prefer 10GB partition for OS.

The same rule applies to other partitions.
bigger partition=longer reading time of fragmented fles.

How much extra distance is there between the start and end of a 10GB and 30GB partition on a 500GB hard drive?

I admit, maybe on larger drives the difference won't be so significant.

I tried that once. XP Kept complaining that the disk was low on space.

Seriously, after updates and such, a 30GB partition is FINE for XP, and FINE for Vista.

Also, unless the hdd has really really really really really really long seek times, having that big of a partition wont make that much of a difference, seeing as it's for the OS and ONLY the OS. If you're storing other programs, along with the OS, then you're still going to be okay.

It all really matters on the setup.

Well, I did a mixture between you two...15 gigs for my OS drive. And it...kinda...sucks. After installing such huge programs such as visual studio, I usually have about a gig left. That then tends to grow and shrink depending on the files I download and don't put on other partitions. So of course I'll get the 'low disk space' errors now and again. Blah.

However, I DO like having at least one seperate partition for other files. I think it should be mandatory for all OS installs just because it is SO nice to know that save for hardware errors or something bizzare your data will still be there if you need to wipe and reinstall Windows.

Currently, I am thinking of a 20 gig OS drive, with two 30 gig partitions. Then again, I am considering Linux, which would then be something like 20 (Win), 10 (Linux), and the rest of the space divided up as needed first by Linux, and then what's left for where I put my files so that if I have to make an OS reinstall, I don't lose them.

Well I was taught to always have the OS on a separate partition.

Then once I got more drives, I just made whole drives for certain things.

So now I have one partition for OS, the other for Music, another for Games, another drive for Programs, another smaller drive for program backups (install files), and one separate drive for anime.

@mortis: You should note that one should at least have three partitions for a linux setup.
- main partition
- swap partition (yes it's possible to use a filecontainer as swapping device, but that's only a fallback and not really recommended)
- boot partition (where the kernel and secondary bootloader is stored, just for safety)

One should consider creating additional partitons for:
- /usr
- /home (to make backups of the user data very easy)
- /var (this one fragments very quick and you don't want that to happen on your main partition, makes it also very easy to defragment - simply tar everything over to main, recreate filesystem on /var and extract back)
- /tmp (should be killed every time the system starts up)

Acid: This will sound newbish but for whatever reason, I can never make that many partitions because (as you know) there is a 4 partition limit per hard drive. At least, in the past anyway. Somehow, I remember getting Suse to do things correctly, but that was pretty far back and it's now vague in my mind.

Maybe I am missing something here. Or maybe whatever distro (I think it was red hat at the time) just couldn't get it done. Or maybe I did somethign wrong. That though was for the reason for my plan above.

Partially right, there is a 4 primary partition limit. Important is the 'primary' part.

No, the 4 primary partition limit does hold even now. I don't know if it's ever going to change. But that's not really a problem, see below...

It's not dependent on the distro. There are only two major partitioning utilities for linux, fdisk and cfdisk. Both are commandline based, the cfdisk is AFAIK based on ncurses, so navigation is a bit easier. I'm pretty sure that any graphical tool relies on one of these cmd tools.

Now the important part, or "how do I get past the 4 partition limit". Again, there is the 4 primary partition limit. Now you can mark any of these primary partition as an 'extended' one. An extended partition is also a primary one, but it can contain additional (logical) partitions.
So what you do if you need more than four partitions is to create three primary partitions, a extended partition (which is another primary partition, maxing out the number of primaries) and the create any other partition as logical one in the extended partition.
Note however that most windows tools won't create more than one primary partition. Unix tools don't have these issues.

Also note that the extended type is not of much use if not filled with logical volumes. Means that you can't create a filesystem on an empty (not filled with logical volumes) extended partition. I think you can (if you try hard enough), but it's not recommended and I'm pretty sure you get the OS confused with that. So don't try it.

EDIT: IIRC cfdisk doesn't give you an explicit option to create a extended partition. It creates one as soon as you're populating the drive with logical volumes. So the only choice when creating new partition is (a) primary or (b) logical. So you would select (a) three times, creating the first three partitions (the boot partition should be one of the primary partitions, to avoid problems with the BIOS) and then fill up the rest with (b), logical ones.

What exactly is the difference between the two? Is there some sort of advantage to maxing out your primary partitions? I had the option of creating another primary partition when I was formatting my new hard drive, but I decided to make it a logical partition since I don't ever intend to make it bootable.

BTW, does anyone else name their partitions? :P I was going to label them according to function (data, games, boot, etc.), but as soon as I typed in "Data" I knew that "Riker" and "Picard" had to follow. :tpg:

It's a question of indirection level. The primary partitions are directly stored in the MBR, the extended partition (I add here that only one primary can be marked extended) is just a link to another table, listing the logical volumes.
I don't think that you get more free space when only using primary partitions. At least not some megabytes, as the tables are usually very small (only some bytes). Also it doesn't affect performance or anything else. It's just that is was done this way since some time and people never changed it. So it's kind of a relic from the post-modern computing time *g*

You can't name partitions, only the filesystem on it (IF this filesystem supports this). I usually have my filesystems named. I have names like "blackHole" or "gammaBurst", something that comes to my mind when creating new fs... :-)