Hello everyone.In my future computer, my father wants to partition the 500 GB HDD into 2 250 GB partitions. May I please know what the term 'partitioning' means and what are its benefits?Thanks!Prad

You just offered this in response to graphics card question in a different topic (at the time just below this one):"Each card, if I'm not mistaken, is good in its own enviroment. The Geforce 8 series cards have better performance in Vista because they support DirectX 10. Putting an 8600 GTS in a DirectX 9 OS is like holding back the power it's itching to show, as it supports DirectX 10, but the OS is DirectX 9.The Geforce 7950 is not going to do well in Vista as it is DirectX 9.0c, but from what I've heard, Geforce 7950 is faster in DirectX 9.0c gaming than the 8600 GTS. And XP is DX9, the 7950 is DX9, so it will give you better performance."And you don't know what a "partition" is on a hard drive? Trying to give you the benefit of the doubt here.....and everyone has their niche.....but..... yes, a very nice new build, BTW I wouldn't fret about partition strategy.Regards, Kendall#1: [email protected]/Coolermaster HyperTX2 Gigabyte P35-DS3L 4GB Crucial Ballistix Tracers PC6400 Seagate 250GB 7200.10 SATA2 Gigabyte X800XT -Cat 6.12's CH Yoke/Pedals/Saitek Throttle Dual Monitor: Dell 2405/1905 #2: Dell 8400 3.2 H.T. 3GB PC4200 Diamond Xtreme/Logitech X-530's

Ok Thanks...For the graphics card thing I was going off what a friend of mine from Microsoft told me. And I'm 13, so I apologize if I got anything wrong.

For practical purposes, a partition is simply an area of hard disk capacity marked out as a separate "part" and seen by the operating system as if it were a separate hard disk drive. Probably the most common use of partitions is to install multiple operating systems on a single computer: each o/s needs its own partition.However, by partitioning 500Gb into 2x 250Gb partitions, you can also (for example) put your operating system with all your programmes onto one partition and keep the other spare for data. In theory, if you do something daft with your operating system and/or programme partition, you may still be able to retrieve your data; and vice versa. Another supposed advantage is that by keeping your applications on one partition - the first one - you will keep them nearer the fastest part of the disk's spindle and thus improve load times.People have different opinions about the value of this kind of strategy. My own is that it is pretty pointless and may actually be counter-productive. I may be mistaken, but I cannot remember seeing any convincing evidence of a noticeable performance advantage by keeping applications on a separate partition from the data (although putting them on a separate physical disk may well make a difference in SOME situations). More troublingly, you may get lulled into a false sense of security about the integrity of your data. In truth you are unlikely to ruin your operating system or programmes in a way which prevents you from recovering your data, even if you keep everything on a single partition. A bigger risk is that the whole disk will simply fail. Partitioning gives you no protection at all against this danger. I suggest you keep away from partitioning until you actually need it - and if you share your computer with your Dad, don't do any partitioning without his say so or you are likely to incur his wrath when it goes wrong. For example, in the classic case of installing a different operating system, you can quite easily lose the ability to boot up at all if you get things wrong. This can be tricky to resolve and even harder to explain to an irate parent.RgdsTim

>People have different opinions about the value of this kind of>strategy. My own is that it is pretty pointless and may>actually be counter-productive. I may be mistaken, but I>cannot remember seeing any convincing evidence of a noticeable>performance advantage by keeping applications on a separate>partition from the data (although putting them on a separate>physical disk may well make a difference in SOME situations).>More troublingly, you may get lulled into a false sense of>security about the integrity of your data. In truth you are >unlikely to ruin your operating system or programmes in a way>which prevents you from recovering your data, even if you keep>everything on a single partition. A bigger risk is that the>whole disk will simply fail. Partitioning gives you no>protection at all against this danger. >>I suggest you keep away from partitioning until you actually>need it - and if you share your computer with your Dad, don't>do any partitioning without his say so or you are likely to>incur his wrath when it goes wrong. For example, in the>classic case of installing a different operating system, you>can quite easily lose the ability to boot up at all if you get>things wrong. This can be tricky to resolve and even harder to>explain to an irate parent.>>Rgds>>TimI have to agree 100% with Tim's comments.

Generally agree, but there is one advantage worth mentioning. I deliberately keep the disk with my operating system and a few key programmes (e.g. my C: drive) fairly small and on a seperate partition (abouth 15 GBytes used with Vista, half that with XP). Its then quick and easy to use Acronis True Image (or Norton Ghost, Powerquest Drive Image to name a couple of alternatives) to back up your complete boot disk, and more importantly restore it if you need to. Acronis takes a complete backup in about 5 minutes. To do this, keep your first partition small (about 50 GBytes), and put all of your documents, non-essential programmes etc. on the second partition. Because its so quick to take a backup, your encouraged to do it on a regular basis. This strategy has saved my life a few times when a dodgy driver has stopped C drive booting and restoring the image got things running again. NB - Its not perfect (i.e. won't help you if the disk dies and kills both partitions) - so you still need to take regular backups.

I have always used hard disk partitioning.In the beginning...there was an idea of having more than one operating systems on a single hard drive. To make this possible, logic was developed so that the hard drive could be divided into as many as 4 different areas, called partitions. The idea was that one of these partitions would be set as "active" and the rest would be invisible. So to change operating system, you set a different partition as "active". The next time you booted, the new operating system would start. That worked out OK, but it still only provided one drive letter (such as C:) per physical hard drive. So they developed a new kind of partition besides just operating system partitions. This partition would be visible without having to be set as "active". this is called the extended partition. There can be only one extended partition per hard drive, and it is one of the max of four allowed on that hard drive, so you could have three other OS partitions, one of which is "active" at any time. The beauty of the extended partition, is that it is very flexible. In particular, it can be divided into any number of logical partitions. These logical partitions are assigned drive letters, and are formated with a file system in Windows just like "regular" partitions.A common use for these logical partitions, is to use different file systems. One could be the old FAT or FAT32, one NTFS, one HPFS, etc. If you are only using one operating system, and only want to have one file system, there is less advantage to setting up these logical partitions. At one time, systems had problems with partitions which were two big, or located in certain physical areas of the hard drive, and that made partitioning almost mandatory, but with modern systems, that isn't really a factor. Right now, my Windows XP operating system partition is 24 Gb. I never make my OS partition any bigger than necessary. All the rest of my 750Gb hard drive is in the extended partition. Right now I have 3 logical partitions in there, with a big chunk of free unassigned space. In the past I didn't want any single partition bigger than about 100Gb, but I might modify that in the future. I don't have any proof that one way is better than others, that's just the way I have always done it and it works for me. scott s..