Why Partition a HD?

[infiltrator7]

First of all, sorry if this is in the wrong section, i dunno where else to put it. My question is, what is the point of partitioning HDs? Isn't it just more of a hassle to have a limit for certain drive letters than having one big drive? Does windows run faster if it's placed on a partition? Thanks.

 

[SushiBoi92]

if used well, it can be a major advantage for large drives in security and organization. ie: you can put all your downloads in one partition and OS in another, and apps in another. Its safer, not necessarilly faster, but i find it very useful. and with a 250gb hdd, you can create an image of the OS and whatnot, and put it in another partition for safekeeping. Its like backing up your data without all the cd's.

 

[jeremy]

basicly when windows goes bad or you wanna install a new os or you just wanna reinstall so it will run faster you need to format , and this is why having more then one partition is a good thing , you put your important data on the other partitions and it stays there after you reinstall windows , but when you have only 1 partition its real messy if you gotta format you need to burn the important data to cd/dvd or copy it to a usb flash memory and when you have more then one partition you dont need to do that, 2 partitions is all you need for the hard drive thats running the os and if you got a second/third hard drive just set each to 1 partition no reason for the other hds to have more then one , i said 2 on the hard drive thats running the os for a simple reason which is lost space i mean lets say you got 3 partitions C:10GB D:7GB E:9GB and lets say you filled up the D way too much then you start to think damm if i only had that D and E as one partition i could have had much more free space on this one.. , anyway be aware that the windows xp setup is very limited on partition operations it cant format an exsisting partition the only things it can do is to delete all partitions and recreate and then it allows to format it so if you just wanna format the main partition C (so you wont lose data on the other partitions) then you gotta use a third party partition manager like acronis disk director suite/partition magic/paragon partition manager

 

[SushiBoi92]

oh yeah, the formatting things too, i forgot about that, thx jeremy
i use partition magic

 

[alexsabree]

so partioning means making two physical drives appear as one virtual drive, in a sense?

 

[TheMajor]

so partioning means making two physical drives appear as one virtual drive, in a sense?

Kind of, you can split 1 physical disk in 2 virtual disks.
As mentioned before: safety and organization.

 

[alexsabree]

oo so its the exact opposite of what i was thinking.. ok thanks for the correction.

 

[TheMajor]

Like this. I have 3 physical disks in my computer, and split them up like this. The main advantage is that I can format the WindowsXP partition at any time without loosing anything else.

 

[alexsabree]

so i guess im with the starter of this forum.... why?

it doesnt to have any performance increase
it can potentially cause errors
and it splits ur harddrive into two virtual hard drives

i can c how it can be usefull if used in the right manner, but what if you have to much stuff on your computer. It would take days to organize stuff into partions...

 

[TheMajor]

so i guess im with the starter of this forum.... why?

it doesnt to have any performance increase
it can potentially cause errors
and it splits ur harddrive into two virtual hard drives

i can c how it can be usefull if used in the right manner, but what if you have to much stuff on your computer. It would take days to organize stuff into partions...

Errors can only happen when creating or modifying partitions. You should just copy your files aroudn to other disks or CD's to make sure u always have a second copy while creating partitions.