Unsolved
This post is more than 5 years old
12 Posts
0
1354
Patitioning a Hard Drive
I've got a Dimension 4550 with 2 hard drives-the primary drive is a Western Digital Caviar Special Edition 160GB drive and the secondary drive is the 60GB drive that came with the system. At the moment I have all of my data in the primary drive in one big partition but I was wondering if there would be any benefits in dividing the drive into smaller partitions for Windows XP, documents, etc. I can already think of one way this might be beneficial to me. I use Acronis True Image 7 to create disk images on my second drive. The incremental backup function only images partitions that have been altered, but as everything is in one partition the whole drive gets imaged when I backup. Would there be any other benefits to smaller partitions? If so, how could I go about creating them and transfering the necessary files and data to the new partitions?
Thanks for any ideas.
Jeremy Cook
12 Posts
0
April 29th, 2004 15:00
I can't answer your first 2 questions since but I do think Acronis True Image is well worth using. Your external drive would only be of any use as a backup if you copied everything manually from your system drive to it, but this would take up a lot of time and space. For example if you had 100GB of data your backup would also be 100GB in size but a program like True Image would compress this by a large extent and could write the backup image to the external drive. Also if you had to manually restore your system it would be a pain at least to copy everything back to your internal drive and at worst may not work at all. True Image would handle all of this for you, restoring your entire system to the point at which you made the last backup. I strongly reccomend True Image, having used version 6 and now version 7. It's really saved me from major disasters on a couple of occasions.
XPS vet
20 Posts
0
April 29th, 2004 15:00
Have read the msg regarding "partitioning a hard drive" and have several questions. Question 1...is partitioning an NTFS file system not a good idea, useless, of no benefit, or sensible?
Question 2...is it easily done or is partioning dependant upon purchased software to accomplish?
Question 3...for backing up my entire XP Pro system, I have & not yet used Acronis True Image 6.0. I also have a new 250 gb Maxtor external drive. Is the Acronis True Image software not redundant since the Maxtor drive is a complete backup system? Should it be removed?
shesagordie
10 Elder
10 Elder
•
46K Posts
0
April 29th, 2004 15:00
Jeremy Cook.
As your system is NTFS, you would gain very little in having multiple partitions. Partitioning is a
personal thing. There is not a right or wrong way to partition a hard drive.
Whether you install multiple, smaller partitions, or leave it as one large partition, that's entirely up to
you. The following article may help you decide.
http://pages.prodigy.net/jdjd/harddisk/partition.htm
Bev.
XPS vet
20 Posts
0
April 30th, 2004 06:00