Partitioning C drive
 

Just purchased my new Toshiba A300. Comes with 350 gig hard drive.

It is already partitioned (kind of) with 10 gig D drive for restore etc.
I used to believe that it was better to partition the hard drive for os, data, media. Is this still the case?

Tried shrinking my c drive already using VISTA disk management software but there is something in my "empty" disk space that prevents it. (paging files)

Thus my question, since C drive is huge. Partitioning involves purchasing partitioning software. Is it really necessary?

Thanks

You can also partition it by reinstalling from scratch and setting the partition sizes to be what you want them to be from the get-go. Of course, that will involve wiping everything on the system, but you'll get your partition sizes.

I still believe that it is appropriate to partition for servers but it is not particularly compelling these days on a laptop/desktop, IMO. There is no performance benefit and it is all on the same hardware so no real protection against the drive dying and still getting your data back.

I'd probably just stick with the 300GB+ drive and not worry about it.

There is no benefit to doing this - I'd also just stick with the single partition. Start with a sensible folder structure for documents, etc. from the beginning and it generally works pretty well. Vista does support the ability to create "mount points" where a particular folder (and subfolders) can be given a new drive letter but for normal circumstances there really is no benefit at all from this.

Getting completely OT here, but mount points are the inverse of what you are suggesting. The ability to mount a folder as a drive letter has existed since at least MS-DOS v6.22, and likely much longer; I just don't have a DOS syntax guide from older versions around to check. The command used is subst and it works like a charm. It is still included in Vista today.

Mount points allow a drive to be seen as a subfolder of a different drive, rather than as a different letter. So instead of C: and D: for your boot and data drives you could have C: and C:\Data as the two "drives."

Partition Magic will not work on Vista.

this will work on 32 bit vista, and is free:

http://www.partition-tool.com/

64 bit vista costs money. there are probably others out there.

Thanks all for your help.

Decided to keep it as is.

I just purchased a 1TB usb hardrive so I can just copy the whole C drive without any problems.

Harddrives are getting so cheap its not worth my time partitioning.

I carry a WD Passport drive around for backing up, due to it not needing external power (USB Bus Powered) and has a nice size (320gb).

No need to partition these days on a laptop... just make sure you backup, only time you would even benefit from a partition is if you got a virus and had to reimage the laptop... but having your data files backed up on your external drive, your already protected from that scenario :)

The only reason I have partitioned my drive is so I could reformat my OS drive without deleting my documents, pictures, etc.
I normally format my machine once every three months or so.

No - that's what I was suggesting. It would give the appearance of partitioning the drive (eg: store system files in C, documents in D, etc) without having to actually do it. You are correct about using the subst command.

And re-install all your applications too? :confused: Seems like a huge amount of effort... I can't imagine for a moment how you would benefit from that, unless you are continually installing "junk" programs that are creating a large amount of additional overhead.

I have two systems that I use on a regular basis, one Vista-based and one XP Pro, both have had the OS installed exactly one time and both are as fast as they were when it was first installed.