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1.5Tb hard drive on XPS 8100 should I partition?
Title says it all really, I recently purchased a Dell Studio XPS 8100 with a 1.5Tb hard drive (non raid) and wondered whether it would be a good idea to partition the drive using around 100Gb for W7 and programmes and the rest for files, what do others think is it wise to partition or not?
John.
shesagordie
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June 15th, 2010 16:00
scrimper
As you have W7, personally I would not create anymore partitions.
Bev.
Jim C
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June 15th, 2010 16:00
Scrimper
I think that your plan is good except 100GB might be too big, it depends on how many restore points, shadow copies, setup logs, etc that you plan on keeping. If malware hits you probably will be only concerned with the OS partition and when moving to a new computer or doing backups life will be considerably easier. I keep all programs on the same partition with the files that create the registry because if it goes the programs must be reinstalled anyway and uninstall probably will not work correctly with a different registry.
Jeff Hoffman
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June 15th, 2010 19:00
How is it partitioned from Dell? I have seen lots and lots and lots of posts where the factory Restore partition is wanted/needed. What would you gain from chopping the drive up???
Jeff
scrimper
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June 16th, 2010 02:00
Well I was surprised TBH to find just one large drive, as you say quite often the manufacturer will create a partition for the back up/recovery stuff but in this case the software is in a folder in the C drive. I don't think recovery would be a problem as I have created the recovery discs on DVD plus I paid a little extra to have a copy of the Windows OS on DVD.
The gain as I see it is that if one wishes to reformat and reinstall Win7 and installed programmes one can leave all the other stuff intact on a separate partition and just format the one partition, I have done this on my other (non Dell) Pc's, the only drawback I find is that sometimes it gets confusing with so many drives showing in Explorer. :)
John.
Jeff Hoffman
881 Posts
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June 16th, 2010 19:00
Have you looked in 'Disk Management"?? The recovery partition on mine does NOT have a drive letter asigned.
Jeff
scrimper
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June 17th, 2010 14:00
You are absolutely correct, I have just checked in disk management and there is a recovery partition of 9.90Gb without a letter, had you not mentioned it I would not have known. :)
Is this actually needed if one has the OS discs and back up recovery discs? How is it used if users (like me) do not know it is there? :)