How many drives/partitions do you have? - Page 3

Will · #21 November 24th, 2003, 10:26 AM

I haven't gotten around to doing any partitioning yet... thus far, it is:

A: 3.5" floppy
C: 40GB HDD
D: CD-ROM
E: DVD+/-RW
F: SmartCard
G: CompactFlash

... B: would be reserved for the 5.25" floppy if I ever was insane enough to find a reason to search for and install one. I'm probably going to be getting an extra HDD or so in a few months, and possibly replace the 3.5" floppy with a ZIP (or hey, why not have both? Seems a bit of a waste to not use a FDD that has survived ten years and four different computers).

Wardad · #22 November 24th, 2003, 08:42 PM

A: 3.5" floppy
C: 5GB System Partition
D: 20GB Program and Data Partition
E: CD 72X Kenwood True X (reads 7 tracks at a time)
F: DVD Player
G: CDR Lite-On 48x

After 4 years Win98 crashed. I think my privacy program attacked my security program.
I took the advice of some members on this board and created a seperate partition for the operating system.
Now if I have to, I can reformat drive C: and reload windows, without losing my games and data on drive D:.

[ November 24, 2003, 18:46: Message edited by: Wardad ]

dHay · #23 November 24th, 2003, 10:48 PM

It depends on what you are using the system for.
(Says me with 50+ computers...

)

Any CDROM, DVD, USB key, etc, can only take one letter, and it just depends on how many you want.

Partitioning up a HD can be questionable. Depends on your budget, IDE slots, etc.

Performance? One partition to the drive. Possibly multiple drives to the partition. (Can you say RAID?)
Experiment: Try copying a file from one drive letter to the other.
Results:
1. Two hard drives, very fast.
2. One hard drive, two partitions, much slower.

You get killed by the head seek from one partition to the other.

If you aren't backing up your data, you didn't want it anyway. Backup does not have to be a "backup" device. Could just be a second HD. Or CDR, DVDR, etc.
Disk drives are cheap enough now, that not backing up to another drive is, umm, not so smart.

Disk drives are cheap enough that tape drive manufacturers are in trouble. A 200G LTO tape drive costs more than 10 times the space in HDs.
Plus tapes.

Wydom@ker · #24 November 24th, 2003, 11:36 PM

Here's what I've ended up with:
A: Floppy
C: [7.79GB] Win2K sp2 (Development install)
D: [12.6GB] Dev Apps
E: [7.79GB] Win2K sp4 (General Install)
F: [2.91GB] Special (Freelancer) tempermental ****
G: [12.6GB] Gen Apps
H: [19.9GB] Games
I: [10.5GB] Downloads
J: [256MB] USB MP3 player - when plugged in
K: [120GB] Storage
W: Virtual DVD/CD
X: Virtual DVD/CD
Y: DVD-RW
Z: DVD

Plus I also have 5 Virtual PCs covering NT/Win98/2K/XP os.

And much of this came about due to Windows crashes, and trying to protect my stuff from these crashes. I lost a near complete ship mod for Freelancer - all I can say is - Backup, Backup, Backup!

[ November 24, 2003, 21:38: Message edited by: Wydom@ker ]

Instar · #25 November 25th, 2003, 07:07 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by David E. Gervais:
I'm talking about windows crashes, they are much more common than a true HD crash.

Ya, get a RAID going like me. My mobo has a built in controller so I found two old 4 gig drives and made a RAID 0 array.

What I cant wait for is when I get my new system with 2 10000 RPM SATA drives in a RAID 0 setup... read write speeds are in excess of 150 mb/s.
Ooooooooooh ya

Stone-D · #26 November 25th, 2003, 06:13 PM

Here's mine, after years of tweaking :

A: Floppy (Duh). Rarely used, only there for absolute emergencies.
C: DOS, Win98se, WinXP, Win2k3, Program Files(1).
D: Games.
E: Data. Work, gfx, code, etc.
F: Media. Video, MP3s, soundz.
G: Archives. Interim backups of downloads, source files for windows installations.
H: CDROM.

D is a seperate 20 gig drive. The rest (C, E, F, G) is one 40 gig drive, part'd. D also hosts a copy of Gentoo linux. If you're wondering about how I got a seperate drive to be 'D' on win98se and DOS, search google for 'Letter Assigner'. Free, does wonders and absolutely safe. Been using it for over two years. Not a plug, lost contact with the author.

"Ah, you loser, yur gunna loze everything in a HD crash!!111"

No, won't. I've got some experience in data recovery and have restored my partition table(2) three times so far. Windows has crashed many maaaany times, but I'm safe from that(3).

(1) Yes, it's doable. No, I'm not lying.
(2) Norton Utilities. NDD.EXE. "NDD.EXE /REBUILD". Does wonders. Diskedit is excellent for a fallback. FYI, Norton is not 'safe' from Systemworks 2001 onwards.
(3) I winzip the windows directories and shove that in G. Yes, WINZIP. Right-click C:\WIN98SE (for example), 'Add to Win98SE.zip'. Rename to Win98SE!.zip. If your windows fubars, just extract to C:\WIN98SE! and reboot to DOS. Now, DELTREE WIN98SE and rename WIN98SE! to WIN98SE. Done. My 'safe' backup sizes at a 63 meg zip file. Oh, not fun with NT OSes, which is why I don't truck with them much.

Erk. On modem. Me go. Yes, that's why the wierd lingo. Cya.