Partitioning my laptop
 

I just got a new laptop, and it's packed with a 120GB HDD which is badass. BUt I realized, that I format very often. And in the past, that hasn't been a problem due to myself always owning multiple HDD's. BUt when it comes to the laptop, if I ever have to format [which is very likely] I'd end up losing everything. Now of course I can always burn things onto a DVD, but that's SO time consuming and wouldn't work in an emergency situation.

Partitioning my HDD would be perfect. One partition set aside for XP, and the other for all of my data. Perfect.

Only thing is I can't get it to work. I've used the XP CD to partition it from the BIOS, but there is no unpartitioned space... So I can't create a new partition. And I've tried Partition Magic as well. And it doesn't let me create a new partition. Can someone help me out here? I honestly hae no idea what to do. I'm guessing I can try resizing a partition, but I've heard in the past that it can possibly destroy your HDD and that it was very risky, and I just got this laptop so I don't want to take that risk.

What can I do? I know this will result in a more detailed inspection and all, and you can reach me at SpectracideX on AIM. I'd REALLY appreciate some help on this, because I want stability for my laptop's future and all. Thanks.

I suggest not to partition a 120 GB HDD. Seriously, it's not that "badass" and while working with large files, you'll soon find smaller partitions to be an unnecessary restraint.

Also, you don't really need to format very often. If you feel it's time for a fresh XP install, you can do that just fine without formating your primary HDD. Alternatively, get an external HDD for backup and archival purposes if you feel the urge to format your internal HDD every now and then (which is totally pointless, though).

I would suggest doing a fresh and clean install, and then going through the XP setup steps, you will be given the opportunity to partition and format your drive, so just break off a 30 gig partition for your OS and applications, and then break off another partition with the remaining.

Also, just because he doesn't necessarily need to format very often, in theory and a perfect world, in practice, sometimes it is necessary to start clean every once in a while.

I suggest deleting the one big partition and creating 3 fourty-gig partitions formatted with ntfs filesystem. Then do a clean install of the operating system.

At least I try to no create partitions greater than 50 Gig (only in special cases, like heavy video editing or mastering issues - DVD-audio and so on). Defragmenting is a not so big problem if you have smaller partitions, because you can store mostly static data on one partition, while storing dynamic data (files that are often modified, deleted, newly created) on the first partition together with the operating system. Third partition for ISO creation, DVD mastering, e.g. (huge files that are created and deleted the next instance - after burning to be precise).

This reduces the defrag process mostly to the first drive. And you also think a lot more about organizing your data (I know some people, owning a >250gig drive, only one partition - content is like absolute chaos, you find nothing, absolutely nothing...)

cya
liquid

You can do a clean install without formatting a system partition. For XP, just be sure to delete the \WINDOWS and \PROGRAM FILES folders. Anything else remains untouched anyways, so formatting is absolutely unnecessary. You can easily back up your Documents and Settings folder by simply renaming it, for example.

Defragmenting your HDD is overrated, anyway. At least with an NTFS file system and a fairly recent drive model, you won't experience any noticable slowdown due to a fragmented disk. Defragmenting once every three or four months is more than enough, even if you have a large > 250 GB partition/disk.

I also doubt the positive effect of small partitions. It's entirely subjective, but I like to have my data organized in one partition on a single drive (I'm even using a 320 GB one at the moment). Organization is a moot argument, because you can use folders to achieve the same effect while not having to worry about partition space.

Well thats your opinion and I certainly don't share this one.

They even say this about reiserfs, reiser4 and some of the even more advanced file systems in the unix area. But the fact is that even these filesystem fragment and if you reach a fragmentation degree somewhere around 50% you will experience some performance loss (and I want to emphasize: ntfs isn't really advanced...).
I won't elaborate more on that, because everyone has to decide on his own if it's worth the time to defragment the filesystem. if you get you perf back by defragmentation then be happy, it not...search somewhere else for the bottleneck (at least I always get back my speed - often working with lots of tiny files)

To me its also a 'security reason'. I like my data being more 'physically' separated than only through a structure in the filesystem. Maybe it's also because I'm a linux guy - I unmount everything that is currently no in use, and you can do this best if you've separate partitions.

I like partitions on my drives. It gives me a much more reassuring feel because the drives are physically [in a sense, or "virtually" I guess is the correct term] separate. It really is worth it to me, although I acknowledge Rock's opinions on it being moot.

I do format very often. Just a simple browse through a website liek cracks.am and other nonsense will inundate my computer with spyware. I'm not going to elaborate on this or accept comments on "simple programs to remove spyware" since that is also moot. I just find it significantly simpler to just format whenever something goes wrong, and reinstall XP easily. Then I just reinstall any important programs and drivers of course, and I'm back to where I was pre-format. Perfect. And in my opinion, the 120 GB is badass for a laptop considering it's completely "mobile" to me, I didn't intend for it to be a complete database. [that's for my desktop and its 280GB space, (which is MORE than enough for me) is]

Another thing, my laptop came with two reinstallation/recovery CD's. With Windows Media Center Edition. Eh, well, it's actually pretty cool so I guess I'll keep it. But when I put it in with rebooting the computer, I got a couple of menus asking if I wanted to do a clean install of XP [media center] and all of the bundled software [eh] but what caught my eye was how it allowed me to allocate the size of the C:.

Considering all of the [useless] software on the disc is like 11GB, I guess I'll set the C: to be around 15GB or so [still extra-large, since I'll end up uninstalling all of their bullshit programs] and then I'll have the rest of the 120 GB HDD [111GB total, technically] as unallocated space I'm guessing. [am I correct?] and then I guess I'll use partition magic to create a partition on the existing space left.

That's my current plan for now, I won't have time for this until Wednesday night/Thursday though, but I'd like some feedback from you intelligent mofos. Heh.

Thanks.