How to Partition your HDD and what it means for your PC

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ImHighAs

50 posts

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#81135 8-Apr-2011 14:57

Hi guys,

Just recently had to do a complete reinstallation of everything on my Desktop because it had so many viruses. Now someone had mentioned to me that i should do a disk partition and was wanting to know a few things.

How this would affect everyday functionality of the Desktop if any

and What would this do in the event of another virus.

Thanks guys,

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Geek @ Coastguard NZ
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#456774 8-Apr-2011 15:13

If you partition your drive, and get hit by a virus, then usually (plenty out there that attack anything however) the virus will only attack your C drive - keep your files on D - then instead of losing everything by formatting the whole drive, you only format your C drive partition and reinstall :)

Gavin / xpd / FastRaccoon / Geek of Coastguard New Zealand

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Jaxson

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#456776 8-Apr-2011 15:25

I think there was a way of redirecting where 'My Documents' etc was actually located. This was back in the XP days but it was helpful if you had multiple drives or a partition, as by default Windows always wanted to head to your C: drive instead of where you were now keeping stuff on the D: etc.

Bit of an aside there sorry.

xpd

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#456783 8-Apr-2011 15:48

Can still direct your documents whereever you like.

Gavin / xpd / FastRaccoon / Geek of Coastguard New Zealand

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foremannz

34 posts

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#456847 8-Apr-2011 20:15

xpd: If you partition your drive, and get hit by a virus, then usually (plenty out there that attack anything however) the virus will only attack your C drive - keep your files on D - then instead of losing everything by formatting the whole drive, you only format your C drive partition and reinstall :)

+1

Make sure you leave ample room for your Windows to function though, because if you run out of disk space on C, everything stops :(

ImHighAs

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#456988 9-Apr-2011 12:40

xpd: If you partition your drive, and get hit by a virus, then usually (plenty out there that attack anything however) the virus will only attack your C drive - keep your files on D - then instead of losing everything by formatting the whole drive, you only format your C drive partition and reinstall :)

Awesome bit of info mate. Do you know if windows has an internal program that deals with partitioning? or would i have to download a program for that?

gzt

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#457014 9-Apr-2011 14:33

Windows does have a tool, but most likely it won't work in your situation (on the system partition):

Start -> settings -> control panel -> administrative tools -> [run as administrator] computer management -> storage -> disk management -> [select disk] -> [right click] -> shrink. After shrinking, create a new partition in the free space.

Alternatively - install windows again and when it detects the existing partition use the 'advanced' option to delete the existing partition and create a new smaller partition. If needed increasing the size later with the utility above is no problem. You can create the second partition at the same time or do it later with disk management.

Resizing operations can take a while anyway, if you don't have much on the system to lose, a reinstall won't take much longer to complete than that.

ImHighAs

50 posts

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#457020 9-Apr-2011 15:28

Thanks GZT and everyone else who helped me out. Will try partition my Drive now and fingers crossed i dont wipe everything off lol.

Thanks GZ

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gzt

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#457030 9-Apr-2011 16:07

The 'alternatively' option will definitely wipe everything off! - just making sure you know that.

soleil24

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#457037 9-Apr-2011 17:04

Other alternative, download a LiveCD version of GParted. Boots its own operating environment from the cd and you can resize (shrink) an active Win partition then go and create some more in the resulting free space. Much safer than trying to do it from within an existing OS.

Just remember any low level disk operations carry a risk so have the important stuff backed up ;-)

ImHighAs

50 posts

Geek

#457039 9-Apr-2011 17:06

soleil24 & GZT are the shizz.

Will DL that program and see what happens. Never knew GZ could be this helpful.

Thanks guys.

soleil24

124 posts

Master Geek

#457040 9-Apr-2011 17:13

GParted is built on (Debian?) Linux. Grab the iso, burn as an iso to a CD and boot your machine from the cd. Last time I looked the interface was pretty intuitive. Sourceforge is a nice reliable source and you may find other options (e.g. bootable USB, probably even PXE)

Big advantage is you then have a totally OS/machine independent tool to do any disk partition management operations in the future, like when you decide you want another bunch of partitions to multi-boot different OSs...

Zach

167 posts

Master Geek

#458071 13-Apr-2011 00:58

Don't bother partitioning.

What if you fill up your second drive which is at the end of the disk and want to make it bigger? You'll have to run GParted to shrink the first drive, then run the process of moving data blocks on the disk which will take hours depending on how much data you have.

xpd

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#458111 13-Apr-2011 08:49

For a 500GB drive, I usually give 80GB to the system (OS and main progs such as Office etc), and the rest gets split up - one for storage of files, other for misc programs such as Steam etc.

Gavin / xpd / FastRaccoon / Geek of Coastguard New Zealand

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foremannz

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#458437 13-Apr-2011 21:00

I only ever run 2 partitions - 1 for the OS, and 1 for everything else, but I tend to set 64GB (habit I have) for the OS. I did once try to install Windows Vista Ultimate x64 on a 32GB SSD, and it took up 30GB, so 64GB seemed like the next logical size LOL.

Ragnor

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#458522 14-Apr-2011 01:13

Zach: Don't bother partitioning.

Agreed.

For the average user, consider instead getting a 1TB or 1.5TB external USB drive for around $100-150 and use a disk imaging program and take regular backups (eg: Acronis True Image etc).

Having 2 partitions on 1 hard drive isn't going to help you if a virus wipes out the whole drive or the hard drive fails.

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