Uncreative Labs

Joined: 19 Oct 2004 Posts: 138 Location: Lynnwood,WA

Puckdropper, I have yet to see a machine with 2+ partitions on the hard disk, and I have installed/fixed/configured over 600 machines this year for various companies, most of them brand new out of the box. I have yet to see one with more than one partition on it except save one or two sites and one manufacturer. Maybe white-boxes are different, but the major manufacturers, for the most part, from what I've see, have one large partition.

The reson I see 2 partitions as a good idea, is if the user's machine crashed down, say Windows registry got boggled up, one could use a recovery console, or even a half-enough-working-windows to move all the critical data to the other partition, reformat and reinstall on the system partition, and you could even put the drivers and all on D partition, to save time. Thats how I used to do it, so far, I've had nothing but good experience this way. With the average hard disk being 60GB or more these days, I don't see why Windows would need 30GB of space, even Vista. I may have 5 partitions, most people would, at most, need 2. I'm not calling this a replacement for burning to CD-ROM or anything, but if the only problem is a gummed up Windows registry and not a boot sector virus, or failing hard disk mechanics, it saves a LOT of time copying data from the backup partition than it does copying from a CD-R or DVD-R due to transfer rate differences.

Anyway, since it's tough to decipher weather I've made anybody mad or not or something, I think I'll just step out of this thread. I don't feel like finding out,

Posted: Thu Nov 09, 2006 4:21 pm

I done that for years everytime I installed on a PC 2 partitions C: and D: and it is really good if crasches or new OS etc. I have more than 2 on machines with linux.

Posted: Fri Nov 10, 2006 4:43 am

The Acer machine I had was split in two even partitions. The second one was supposed to be there for recovery purposes, but Acer shipped the laptop without having that part done. Basically, all it did was create an unnatural seperation with the computer. YMMV, but that's how it worked for me.

I'd rather have a recovery CD with all the drivers and stuff because if your hard drive dies you're out of luck. Sometimes it's hard to find drivers for your machine because it's either got unusual hardware or you can't find any info about the hardware in it.

Posted: Sat Nov 11, 2006 12:18 pm

Yes HDDs can die, in this machine I have 3 HDDs with two partitions each 200 Gb, 60 Gb and 20 Gb Smile

Importent stuff is on two HDDs so if one dies I have backup.
The two with no OS will probably last longer.

Joined: 03 Feb 2006 Posts: 488 Location: pennsylvanai

to paraphrase " partitions, maybe, more drives YES"
couple of things
win 98 is supposed to deal with up to 60gb
the mb we have is supposed to deal with about 60-80 gb

3-40gb permit defrag and scandisk to work.
with 2 60gb partitions, d: formatted as 59.?? gb ok
but c: fdisked as 58.?? gb and formatted as 25gb?
this is with a promise ata 133 controller to overcome the limitations of the mb.
we also have a 10g drive for a backup of critical data.

it may be likely that all 120gb will die at once, so far c: (40gb)
has becom3e corrupted twise and we have had to re-do it.
would xp be better? I don't really know
maybe w2000 with ntfs.

Posted: Sat Nov 11, 2006 10:51 pm

XP handles large HDDs just fine and so does w2k

Posted: Sun Nov 12, 2006 3:32 am

I had trouble running my 80 gig drive with 98. Once I put Server 2003 on it, I haven't had any other trouble with the hard drive. It also wasn't happy about switching back and forth from Linux to Win98, that's when the partition table would corrupt.

Joined: 28 Feb 2006 Posts: 127 Location: LI, NY

Just to throw more fire on the partition discussion.

I have a Windows 95 box that was given to me, it has two partitions (C: & D: ). I have to agree w/ Puckdropper, it causes a little confusion on where you'd like to save stuff. I'd rather have one large partition. If the OS goes, I can always just throw the drive into another computer and copy the files. It's not a big deal and takes just as long as using the recovery console to copy from one partition to another.

Many partitions are nice in *nix like OS's because they flow as one large drive, unlike in Windows based ones. (At least how I have mine set up).

Anyway, that's just my 2 cents.

Joined: 14 Jan 2007 Posts: 15

XP is all you need on a modern PC (circa 2002-2006)
Maybe even a 2007 PC.

I will not touch Vista until 2010.

Joined: 27 Jan 2007 Posts: 274 Location: USA

I don't want to use vista unless I have to and only if there are tiny versions of it without the silly colors. Smile

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

It took me about 4 years to switch to eckspee, and the whole eckspee experience really turned me off windows for life. In short, I will not be touching vista with a 10 foot pole...and by the way, what the <BANNED> took so long to get it out the door? Where are all these "amazing features"? To me it looks like they just slapped some cheezy graphics onto XP. Whatever performance enhancing "features" they included are probably cancelled out by all the dumb eye candy. I bet out of the box it takes 1GB just for the OS to run without having to swapfile like crazy. No thanks. I'll stick with anything else that doesn't suck.

Word has it that this will probably be Microsoft's last consumer operating system that is built on their crap proprietary code. It seems that for the next major release they will likely do something similar to what apple did and base their system on a UNIX core. Maybe that's what this deal with Novell is all about....

Posted: Sun Mar 04, 2007 11:29 pm

Still resisting XP.
My wife uses it just to run her Sims2.
I use 98SE when I need to run windows.
The rest of the time I use whatever I chose from the boot menu (DOS, 3.1, Linux - whatever flavor, BSD, OSX, OS9, QNX, whatever). Just about anything works as good as XP if not better. For me at least.