Need Advice on Partitioning before XP Home Reinstall

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Brian - 31 Aug 2003 16:33 GMT

After almost two years with my current installation of
WinXP Home, I'm about to reformat and reinstall. It's
been a little buggy on occasion recently although not
bad. More than anything, I'm just looking for a project.

The machine has two hard drives. One is 60GB and the
other 80GB. Today, XP is installed on the 60GB drive and
the other drive is used primarily for data and the swap
file. Each drive currently has a single partition.

Here's the scoop ... I'm looking for recommendations on a
new partitioning scheme. Rather than one for each drive,
I'm thinking about breaking it down. I'd like to make the
OS partition smaller so I can easily 'Ghost' it for
recovery. BTW ... XP is the only OS to be installed
(although I might consider a small DOS partition on each).

So ... any suggestions from anyone? Number of partitions
per drive? Size of those partitions? Location of OS,
Apps, Data, Swap file, etc.?

Thanks in advance!
Brian

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Robert Moir - 31 Aug 2003 17:53 GMT

> After almost two years with my current installation of
> WinXP Home, I'm about to reformat and reinstall. It's
[quoted text clipped - 5 lines]
> the other drive is used primarily for data and the swap
> file. Each drive currently has a single partition.

[...]

> So ... any suggestions from anyone? Number of partitions
> per drive? Size of those partitions? Location of OS,
> Apps, Data, Swap file, etc.?

I've got a 160mb and an 80, and I've split them into 40gb chunks which works
well for me as I work with a few very big files sometimes.

I keep one partition on the 2nd disk as a place to store a ghost image of
the primary partition, which is handy when you have problems ;). I don't
assign this partition a drive letter within windows to make it harder for
nasty unexpected things to happen to my ghost image.

One thing to remember is that especially with XP, you don't *have* to create
partitions straight away. If you can't think of a use for disk space on a
drive then rather than just making all your other partitions bigger than
they need to be, why not leave the extra room as unused space, then you can
carve yourself a chunk of it as soon as you do think of a use for it.

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Rob
MS MVP
http://www.robertmoir.co.uk

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