Is it better to partition my hard drive?

Partitioning may be a good idea but I think you need to have a big enough hard drive to do it. It is like spliting your hard drive into 2 or more hard drives and it means reducing the capacity of each. It may come in handy in cases of failure and stuff like that. It has a lot of advantages though.

hello votreamie, partitioning is a personal think.there is no 'right" or 'wrong" into it.whether you prefer to bust up your disk into multople,smaller partitions,or leave it as a single,monster-sized partition,that's entirely upto you. in either case no one can claim that you did anything wrong.because your strategy depends on what works best for you. i personally would recommend you to go for it.because i feel multiple partitions offers a great degree of flexibility.the least-flexible configuration is a single-drive system that contains only a single partition. i would like to say something regarding the advantages of multi-partion drives: 1. a hard drive containing multiple partitions allows you to lower your drive's effective access time,providing you with a more reponsive system. 2. the main reason people prefer a drive with multiple partitions than a single large partition is because having a separate system partition,containing only your OS(windows xp) and programs,allows you to reformat your system partition and reistall windows without loosing all the data on the drive. 3. it allows you to defrag only those partitions that actually need defragging.this saves wear and tear on your drive and may even help keep it from failing prematurely. 4. it allows you to easily create and restore images using programs like norton ghost.imaging is fine for a smaller partition but for large ones with lots of data,its not practical. 5. if you want to dual-boot or multi-boot operating systems,you must create separate partitions for each OS.because each OS needs its own partition. 6. the vast majority of people install windows to their c drive.hackers know this and target the c drive.you are less likely to be hacked if windows resides on a drive other than c. to summerize all this i would say that partitioning is needed mainly due to 3 things: 1.it boosts computer performance. 2.safeguards your data. 3.organizes your work. i hope i am helpful to you votreamie in some way.

I have about 600 Gb of external backup space, so I store all my data and images etcetera on there now and use a single partition on my internal hard drive. However, when I used to store most of it on DVDs I had my hard drive partitioned. This way I could reformat the C: drive and reload Windows without the need to insert several discs to copy all my data back. As for the software, a simple Windows 98 boot disk will let you run FDISK and partition the drive.

I partitioned my drive twice, the first time slowed it down. The second partion was to correct the first partition. What I did was made sure the primary drive, was bigger than the secondary drive. Since doing that, I haven't had any problems. I used partiton magic and it was my desktop. But, you can use windows fdisk. If you have a start-up disk or a DOS disk, it will have fdisk on it. You can even download start-up / dos disk online, unzip them to a 3.5 or cd if you don't already have a start-up disk with fdisk on it. Good-luck.

you should partition your drive... actually it's advisable to make a separate partition for your operating system and all the stuff related to it and one or two partitions for personal stuff, movies, books, music... tis is goo because you can format the operating system when ever you want without loosing all the data on the hard disk;)

its better to partition your hard drive. its for back up purposes. you have files need to be back so you need partition. you can search partition softwares in the net. partition magic is one.

partition,does that mean to divide your hard drive into several parts? my hard driver is divided into four parts,c,d,e,f,c is for system and software,d is for download things,e is for learning materials and some important things.f is for entertainment,such as movies or musics. my friends helped me do that,he use DOS,i don't know how to use it.too complicated to do that job.

Well my S/O does computer tech support and he strongly advises against partitioning. He says that there is no real benefit to it and it can slow things down, plus you won't have full use of your hard drive.

maybe you can do that. Its will make your computer more easiear to control.

I put partition on my hard drive also because it protects your files and it would be easier for you to reformat your pc if necessary... I forgot the software i used though ;)

it is a good idea partition the hard disk, because if you have just one partition if you have a problem with a virus or you want to change your operating system, you will need to copy all your information, so it will make more fast and you will not waste time copy all your files to another storage device, if you have a partition in your hard disk , you will have to use a tool like partition magic or something like it, that let you move the partition, obviously, you need to have enough free space in your hard disk, it will looks like you have two hard disk, and if it is a new computer, I mean if the hard disk is empty you can use a boot disk or in the installation you will be able to make partitions but be carefully, because if you do it and you have files on there,you will lost everything so in this case you need partition magic or a free tool to move your partition and resize it.

Of course, to protect your data files. Use Norton Partition Magic 8.0 Make at least 2 local drives and 1 system drive. All in all 3 drives. Allocate the system for your system files. The other two for data files. If your PC get crashed, only the two drives will not be erased when you decided to do reformatting of your Harddrive.

I forgot to mention, if you are running xp and you wipe your infomation off of the drive and start over, the xp installation disk at the beginning lets you create and format the partition. Should you decide to do that, I recomment running the installation disk, make the first partition whatever size you want it, format it, install xp, then once in xp use the management tools in the control panel to create any other partitions you want in the unused space.

I dont recommend partitioning the hard drive. I consult several businesses on their backup systems and do the physical maintenance. What happens when you partition the hard drive if the hard drive has a physical failure. Not only is your operating system gone, but you now no longer have a back up of your personal files either. You have to remember that your personal files may be on a seperate partition, but they are on the same physical hard drive. Hard drive quits it is all gone. On the computers of the businesses I take care of there are two scenarios I use. The first is to have two physical hard drives installed. Then I install Norton Ghost and use it to make a disk image on the backup drive. That way if the main drive fails, you just through that one in the garbage and put another hard drive in the computer. Then you run Norton Ghost from the cd and it writes the information back onto the new hard drive exactly as it was at the time of the last backup before the crash. With these businesses I do a complete backup weekly, and a incremental backup (backsup only the changes since the full one) daily. If the backup drive fails, you through that one away and put in another backup drive, because your main drive is still functional. The second scenario I use is a system called RAID which writes to several hard drives at the same time. spreading the files across the multiple drives. If one fails you simply throw that hard drive away and put in another one, and it uses the check sum or parity on the rest of the good drives to recreate the infomation that was on the bad one. No down time involved here, but much too expensive for typical personal use. Norton Ghost and a backup hard drive is fairly reasonable price wise. True if you partition you can reinstall your operating system on the one partition and still have your personal files, but what if the partitioning information becomes corrupt or the hard drive starts making the dreaded knocking sounds. I am afraid you just lost it all. Actually a lab can recover the personal files with that kind of a failure, but the lab cost runs between 900 and 2400 dollars. Youch take care and good luck in your decision.

In my pc there are two os: windows xp and ubuntu (linux), so i choice for this: -60 Gb for windows os (ntfs filesistem); -50 Gb for Ubuntu (ext3 filesistem); -50 Gb only for datas: music, video and other (fat32 file sistem) Using fat32 partition for datas i can share them between windows and ubuntu witout problems, doing this i can modify datas from windows or ubuntu without problems because ubuntu totally support read and write fat32!