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jewgalo
Status: Curious
Joined: 26 Mar 2006
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ohh ok... but is there anyway i can make it all one partition like would i need a new version of XP seeing as how mine is really outdated...?
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jeffd
Status: Assistant
Joined: 04 Oct 2003
Posts: 594
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No idea, to be honest, when you upgrade to SP 2, see what happens, xp will either show itself on a 232 gig hard drive partition, though I have no idea why you'd want to put all your data in one partition. I always put os and programs in one, about 20 gig, then use the rest for data, in a separate partition, makes reinstalls a breeze. Or it will show as 130 gig, with a blank rest of disk, unformatted, I don't know how windows handles that because I'd never dream of putting everything in one partition, that's just a bad idea from my experience, much harder to recover from damages.
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jewgalo
Status: Curious
Joined: 26 Mar 2006
Posts: 9
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i cant believe i never thought of that... i used to back everything up into a seperate hdd when doing reinstalls, but this seems so muuuch easier... thanks for all your help and tips jeffd... but let me get one thing straight... say i make a partition of 50 gigs, install SP2 and reboot... XP will automatically recognize the other 180?
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jeffd
Status: Assistant
Joined: 04 Oct 2003
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2 partitions is the way to go, I keep all my data off my os / programs partition, to do that you have to change the default path for my documents and your emails, though the email won't take more than 2 gig or so at most over a few years.

If you install on 50 gig partition, then install xp sp2, when you reboot, you have to create the second partition using windows administrative tools => computer management => disk manager.

With disk manager you can create and format a partition, give it a drive letter, or mount it in a folder.

Things like the gparted livecd work better than the native windows disk manager, more options, but the windows one works fine if all you need to do is create a single partition on the remaining part of one disk, and format it ntfs.
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jewgalo
Status: Curious
Joined: 26 Mar 2006
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ok, so i followed your advice and partioned the drives... so now i have one 50 gig drive and one 184 gig drive... is it possible to only use the bigger drive as my primary and if god forbid i get a virus or troejn do both drives get affected...?
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jeffd
Status: Assistant
Joined: 04 Oct 2003
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I'm not clear what you mean about using the bigger as your primary, but this is how to do it logically:

partition 1: windows, aka c:\ ~ 20-50 gigabytes
partition 2: data - the rest of the drive.

I don't understand why you'd want the larger one, partition 2, to be the xp drive when you've already installed on partition 1. You can't move xp around after install, it will fail, usually anyway, you have to leave it where you installed it. if you want a more powerful operating system use a linux based one, that can handle changes much more robustly, with windows you just have to stick with what you have or you'll have problems.

You may not be clear on the point: you will never ever need more than 50 gigabytes, really you'll never need more than 20 gigabytes, for the operating system + programs. It simply isn't possible to use that much realistically.

With your os and programs on that smaller partition, you now use the larger partition to store all your working data, everything that is not your operating system or programs etc.

Move your 'my documents' path for example to open on a folder in the larger partition, and so on. All your data will be on that one, plenty of room there too unless you download a lot of multimedia type stuff all the time.

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if god forbid i get a virus or troejn do both drives get affected...?

That depends on the virus author, but usually they jump into the windows guts and bury themselves in there, but sometimes they will also infect data files at random locations, just depends on what the virus/trojan author wanted to achieve.

If you're really worried about viruses, make sure to use a good software firewall like zonealarm, not the native windows one, turn that off, use a real one, and make sure you have good antivirus, norton and mcAffee are terrible, avg, and antivir are good free ones, nod32 is a great commerial one. Read more on basic security here. That has links to various decent products, most free.
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jewgalo
Status: Curious
Joined: 26 Mar 2006
Posts: 9
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what i meant was, i download a lot of multimedia... all of which will go on the larger drive (F:) however, should i need to re-install XP which is drive C: how would i go about doing that without losing all my data on drive F:? i've never partioned drives before so im really lost here...
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jeffd
Status: Assistant
Joined: 04 Oct 2003
Posts: 594
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however, should i need to re-install XP which is drive C: how would i go about doing that without losing all my data on drive F:? i've never partioned drives before so im really lost here...

The joy of partitioning is that when you reinstall, if you need to, you will be reinstalling in c:\, so nothing at all happens to the other drive, say it's called d:\.

So the data just sits there. The more data you put like that, the easier it is to recover from a reinstall. I put all my stuff in other partitions, no real data, email, configuration stuff, etc, goes in my operating system partition. That holds for my Windows and my GNU/Linux installs.

That's why my operating system partition doesn't need to be very big, it's only going to need about 6-10 gig max for the data, and then maybe 5 gig max to work on files, temp stuff, etc.
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jewgalo
Status: Curious
Joined: 26 Mar 2006
Posts: 9
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ok cool, im begining to understand this a bit more... so how would i go about changing the path names to my documents, etc...


Also, do i need to make the larger drive active and haev the other one just be bootable...?
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jeffd
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Joined: 04 Oct 2003
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Also, do i need to make the larger drive active and haev the other one just be bootable...?

No: ABSOLUTELY NOT. Leave it the way it is, active means it's the one that boots, that will mess everything up. All you have to do is create the partition and leave it at that. It's not active, and it's not bootable.

Several threads cover moving my documents, outlook file, etc:

change default target for 'my documents'

change outlook file location

Changing outlook express is even easier, but if you don't want to deal with the email stuff, it's not that much to worry about, it won't get that big over time, it's the stuff that goes in the my documents etc that makes the biggest difference over time.
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