...to partition or not to partition...

Wednesday, November 24, 2004 by Essencay | Discussion: WinCustomize Talk

Wife's harddrive is busting at the seams (20GB) so I went out to get her something bigger and ended up getting myself two 120GB seagates 'cause they were only $60 each after rebates So now I'm gonna move my drives to her pc and install the seagates in mine.

Since the beginning of my PC experience I've always partitioned my drives down to manageable size partitions, just a left over habit from when Win95 could only handle 2GB partitions. So here are my options...

1. ghost my old drives over to the new drives and use partition magic to stretch the drive partitions afterwards.

2. start afresh and then transfer data files over after my OS is fully installed.

I'm leaning towards no.2, time consuming, but that's not an issue. Question is, should I partition the new drives or not? Also, since I am a sole user on XP Home edition, what benefit does NTFS give me over FAT?

Thanks in advance
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Kevin_C
Reply #1 Wednesday, November 24, 2004 5:18 PM
AH, you ask the perfect question!! The benefit that NTFS will give you over FAT or even FAT32 is a saving of a great deal of space. If you use large partitions with FAT or FAT32 you are losing lots of your drive space to filesystem overhead. I don't know the exact numbers but with 120 and 200GB drives in my machine each with 2 partitions (just because a 200GB single drive is enormous) my cluster size is 4096 bytes. With FAT32 it would be something like 16 KBytes and I don't even think FAT will handle a 100GB partition. So, what you'll be saving is space and lots of it. If you need any more details just ask and I'll see what I can answer..

Good Luck!

Jafo
Reply #2 Wednesday, November 24, 2004 5:22 PM

NTFS vs FAT is all about stability/security of the system.

Fat is primitive in comparison....only downside to NTFS is that it's 'generally' invisible [the drive] to Dos or Win 9x, etc.

I use Drive Image 7 to create a second bootable OS drive....in caddies so I can switch over quickly if there's an OS 'fragging'.  The 2 drives I use are a 60 and an 80 gig....so both have a 20 gig OS partition to facilitate Imaging.

Otherwise I prefer multiple physical drives.....cos partition or not, if a drive has a mechanical failure ALL data is made from unobtainium irrespective.

BTW...both OS drives access the third Data drive...and that work data is backed up to the OS drive's second partition.  Good old redundancy backups... 


Essencay
Reply #3 Wednesday, November 24, 2004 5:35 PM
Since any old dos or win9x proggies that won't run in XP, I run on VirtualPC, I should be looking at NTFS since FAT32 has no benefit to me anymore?

eieio
Reply #4 Wednesday, November 24, 2004 5:51 PM
I would go with NTFS, essencay. For the reasons described above.

As far as partitions, it may be good from an organizational standpoint to have separate OS and Data partitions.

Kevin_C
Reply #5 Wednesday, November 24, 2004 10:00 PM
it may be good from an organizational standpoint to have separate OS and Data partitions

Absolutely!! Completely forgot about that.. Give your OS a 10 or 15 GB partition (if you're also installing apps there) and keep all of your data on another partition. This GREATLY reduces your exposure should XP go awry. I never had this happen but you can never be too careful. Actually, using a registry editor or an easier way is using TweakUI for XP, you can store your My Documents, My Music and other default XP folder on the other partition as well to make sure you don't lose that data in case of a disaster.

NTFS vs FAT is all about stability/security of the system.

I'd say cluster size is a big one as well.. I mean with new larger drives, I certainly don't want to lose 16,000+ bytes of my harddrive to the hundreds or thousands of tiny little files that windows creates all over the place. Granted, it's less important on a daily basis than the stability/security but I'd still say it's a factor.

Sugaree
Reply #6 Wednesday, November 24, 2004 10:23 PM
Wife's harddrive is busting at the seams (20GB) so I went out to get her something bigger and ended up getting myself two 120GB seagates 'cause they were only $60 each after rebates So now I'm gonna move my drives to her pc and install the seagates in mine.


I'd smack you upside you're head... If you did that to me!



[Message Edited]

Jafo
Reply #7 Wednesday, November 24, 2004 11:23 PM
...and she would, too....

eieio
Reply #8 Wednesday, November 24, 2004 11:25 PM
So now I'm gonna move my drives to her pc and install the seagates in mine.


technicians perogative

PixelCargo
Reply #9 Thursday, November 25, 2004 3:35 PM
What will be the difference between NTFS and the upcoming WinFS ?

kona0197
Reply #10 Thursday, November 25, 2004 3:55 PM
I heard it said that WinFS will run on top of NTFS.

aufisch
Reply #11 Thursday, November 25, 2004 4:18 PM
@ China

Yea, I am with you there

Jafo
Reply #12 Thursday, November 25, 2004 4:38 PM
I think the difference is....NTFS is available....where-as WinFS is unlikely to be included in the next OS...

Essencay
Reply #13 Thursday, November 25, 2004 4:41 PM
@ China

Essencay
Reply #14 Friday, November 26, 2004 2:12 PM
Hiya...I'm stuck trying to backup my C: partition. I setup my new drives with NTFS and the drive image software I'm trying to use is Drive Image 2002. when my system reboots to do the backup I get an error about a disk manager. I went to Symantec to figure out what was wrong http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/powerquest.nsf/0b685d0feb12bb8988256e970047cea7/3f37e9dd3e899ca888256e75007c6c2c?OpenDocument&prod=Drive%20Image&ver=2002&src=sg&pcode=dimage&svy=&csm=no followed the directions. Backed up with the program they show. Then using a Win98 boot disk ran fdisk /cmbr 1. Rebooted. XP recognized some system changes and asked to reboot. Rebooted again. Then ran Disk Image again. Still having the same error. Anyone got any ideas, what else I can try? Or is there other disk imaging software out there that doesn't care what's on the MBR? Thanks

Fuzzy Logic
Reply #15 Friday, November 26, 2004 2:28 PM
If you are making a new drive you shouldn't be creating a back-up, you should be selecting 'Copy Disk'. That will copy your C:/ to the new drive.

Essencay
Reply #16 Friday, November 26, 2004 2:37 PM
Hiya Fuzzy
I installed two new drives...formatted each with three partitions and NTFS...installed XP Home as a fresh install...set up everything the way I want it on the c: partition and now I'm trying to make a backup of it, before I start installing other software and SP2. The only thing that is different with this than my old setup is that I'm using NTFS instead of FAT32. Drive Image thinks there's a disk manager on the MBR and the version of Drive Image I have supports NTFS...so I am at a loss.

Fuzzy Logic
Reply #17 Friday, November 26, 2004 2:47 PM
Ah, see what you mean... But, why is it rebooting? Mine copies on the fly, yours should too. Unless your drive geometry isn't correct... I'd check your partitions in disk manager, might be worth reformatting from there.

Fuzzy Logic
Reply #18 Friday, November 26, 2004 2:49 PM
If it gets desperate you could try formatting one of your partitions as FAT32 - disk manager won't have any hooks in a FAT32 drive.

Essencay
Reply #19 Friday, November 26, 2004 3:08 PM
Opened up XP's Disk Manager and everything looks fine there. You mentioned that your's copies on the fly. What proggie are you using? Drive Image 2002 won't backup (create an image) of the C: partition while Windows is running.

Jafo
Reply #20 Friday, November 26, 2004 5:46 PM

Drive Image 7 is the one you should be using.....images the OS drive on the fly.

2002 won't do that and also does not handle NTFS as well as you'd like it to.  I had the same messages in an older Drive Image.

DI7 is totally pain-free by comparison [2002 is bundled with it].

If you grab it online [as I did] be ready for a big download [400+ meg] ...


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