Author Topic: New computer, 80 gig hard drive... (Read 1603 times)

Gloves · « **on:** November 24, 2003, 07:44:51 PM »

Just got a new computer this week and already have a question about it.

Currently the HD is configured for only one drive. I've heard it's a good idea to have it set up as several drives - one for the O/S, one for data files, one for whatever else.

What are some good was to set this up to maximize it's efficiency? If I set up a dedicated area for the O/S, can I blow it out & reinstall the O/S or will I have to blow out the entire drive?
These are the questions I'm dealing with. Darn the luck.

Thanks,

Gloves

bloom25 · « **Reply #1 on:** November 24, 2003, 07:49:05 PM »

If you were talking about Linux or to a lesser extent Windows ME or older that might make good sense. I personally don't think there are any significant advantages from a performance standpoint with Win2k/XP using NTFS to having multiple partitions on the same physical drive. If you had more than one harddrive, you could put the swap file on a separate drive and gain a bit in some cases.

zmeg · « **Reply #2 on:** November 24, 2003, 07:59:08 PM »

Yes you can format your c drive and not loose what on your other drives. BTW bloom what advantages are there to NTSF over fat32??

Roscoroo · « **Reply #3 on:** November 24, 2003, 11:52:33 PM »

he's talking about partitioning his hard drive ,

on a 30 gig or less i dont partition ,for the 40 gigs and up i partion them in half . (AE an 80 gig i would make 2 40 gig partitions )

now the advantage of this is you install the OS ,drivers ,programs,.exe's , ect on the first partition,

the second part you use for all your saveable storage,back ups ,full programs uninstalled, ect (dont put running .exe's on this part unless its a second OS)

or you can use the second partition for an additional OS

the advantage with the 1st partition is if you have to reformat its a simpler task that takes less time and you dont lose what you have backed up on the second partition .

TweetyBird · « **Reply #4 on:** November 25, 2003, 08:09:52 AM »

Isn't the advantage of NTSF, the ability to assign privileges to individual files? I dunno, it's been years since my one ( and only) networking class

qts · « **Reply #5 on:** November 25, 2003, 02:52:42 PM »

NTFS has many advantages over FAT32. It is more space-efficient, more robust, more error-tolerant, more resistant to fragmentation (and fragmentation is not nearly so important as under FAT), supports compression, file-level security ...

bloom25 · « **Reply #6 on:** November 25, 2003, 03:37:39 PM »

Individual files can also be over 4 GB in size, which is important if you do video capture/editting.

beet1e · « **Reply #7 on:** November 30, 2003, 04:30:00 AM »

Quote

Originally posted by zmeg
Yes you can format your c drive and not loose what on your other drives.

I did that about a week ago - which is why I was offline for about 6 hours.

I also have a Maxtor 80GB HDD. When I built my rig, I partitioned the HDD into two - 15GB and 65GB. The 15GB was going to be for gaming with WMe, and the 65GB would be for everything else under W2000P. However, the 15GB partition came first and was created as drive C. The other became drive D. When I got my new Logitech stick, and was able to install the profiling software with W2000P, I found I could play AH on W2000P and no longer needed WMe. So I formatted the C drive (having backed it up to my Maxtor external HDD). And guess what? I could not longer boot W2000P from drive D.

The boot.ini file seems to be stored on C:\ under any circumstances. But even with this one file restored, I no longer had dual boot capability as I had had before. With dual boot, I was getting a DOS screen inviting me to choose between WMe and W2000P. Having formatted C:\ all I got was "Verifying DMI pool...", and then the system would hang up. I was up the creek without a paddle.

I tried various recoveries, but the one that worked in the end was to put in yet another HDD, and to install an OS on it - in this case WXP. I set the BIOS to boot off that drive, and then installed Drive Image 7 - which I had used to do the HDD backups. I was then able to recover drive C. Initially I was still unable to boot up, but ran FDISK and found I had to make my W2000P the active partition. That setting had been toggled for some reason.

And woohoo! I was able to reboot once more - dual boot working OK.

Your config. might not match mine completely, but do be cautious about formatting C:\. Make sure you back it up as I did, else you could be looking at a reformat weekend.

qts · « **Reply #8 on:** November 30, 2003, 04:21:06 PM »

Quote

The boot.ini file seems to be stored on C:\ under any circumstances.

This is not strictly true but involves moderately advanced partitioning and a more advanced boot manager.

Quote

But even with this one file restored, I no longer had dual boot capability as I had had before. With dual boot, I was getting a DOS screen inviting me to choose between WMe and W2000P. Having formatted C:\ all I got was "Verifying DMI pool...", and then the system would hang up. I was up the creek without a paddle.

You should have booted off the W2000 CD and attempted to repair. For future reference, you needed

boot.ini
ntldr
bootsect.dos (for W98)
ntdetect.com

in c:\

And you need to format it with W2k or XP so that the boot sector looks for ntldr.

beet1e · « **Reply #9 on:** January 17, 2004, 05:19:00 AM »

Qts, a couple of months have gone by, and I found I needed to refer to your post above. ^ I was replacing the CDROM drive in Tomato's PC (my old one). First I uninstalled the SCSI HP9600i that was in there. Who would have thought that a simple little job like this could cause the PC to fail to boot up, and a few hours work getting it working again?

The problem was the boot.ini file. It seems that removing the CDROM drive caused some shifting of the drive letters which affected Tomato's active/boot partition, so that the PC was trying to boot from a non-bootable partition. We tried reinstalling WXP to the first partition, but to no avail. So I looked at what was in my own boot.ini. Here it is.

[boot loader]
timeout=10
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINNT
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINNT="Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional" /fastdetect
C:\="Microsoft Windows"

Two OS, WMe and W2000. What worried me was when we saw the reference to a specific drive letter. No way of knowing what Tomato's old boot.ini was once that reinstall of XP had happened. So I removed the line which references C:\, and altered the default=multi line to point to partition(5) which is where the OS was, and set the directory name to WINDOWS. It worked, and a reformat weekend was averted!

I notice in your post that you say it's "not strictly true" that the boot.ini goes on the C:\ drive. Were you alluding to the fact that the first partition may not be known by that letter?

One last Q. There seem to be various partition types. System, Boot, and Active. Any info on the different types, and any further info on coding for the boot.ini file?

bloom25 · « **Reply #10 on:** January 17, 2004, 01:37:57 PM »

It's possible to boot multiple OSes if you use something like one of the Linux bootloaders (Grub or Lilo). Ntldr is the Windows NT bootloader, and actually with a bit of modifying I was able to get ntldr to boot linux and windows. Generally speaking nearly all PCs boot by executing the very first block of the boot device, but it is possible to do a raw disk dump of the first block of any drive with an OS on it. Save this first block as a file and place it on the drive with your primary OS on it. You then need to modify the bootloader for the primary OS to execute the dumped first block off the other drive to boot the other OS. That's how I got the nt bootloader to boot linux. (I booted Linux off a CD, did a dd (disk dump) of the first block on that drive and saved it to a floppy. I then put that file on my Windows "C" drive under the root folder and added a line to boot.ini that simply executed that file.)

qts · « **Reply #11 on:** January 17, 2004, 02:28:00 PM »

Bloom25 speaks wisely.

Those lines in the [operating systems] section of boot.ini are in ARC format. Microsoft's website will explain all. If you are dual-booting XP and 98, you may see a reference in this section to bootsect.dos. This is the dumped first block. There are articles on the web that explain how to do this.

In XP, any partition may have any letter, as long as there is no duplication (and volumes and dynamic disks add a whole seperate set of fun, but I suggest that the home user steer well clear).

Vulgar · « **Reply #12 on:** January 21, 2004, 06:08:23 AM »

One nice method of accessing the HD and reading and or writing (reparing) is to us LNX-BBC.

http://www.lnx-bbc.org/

It is business card size, boots from the cd and has over a thousand programs to play with.

Windoze xp, 2000 both boot from partitions 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 ect. Win 95,97,98 must boot from c drive and or partition. There are plenty of publications available. Look in the old cheap book section at one of the franchized book stores. You can usualy find a Linux book for a few bucks that goes into detail about multi-booting and the Linux and Windoze boot sequence. Usualy has a Linux distro included as a bonus.

Try using a program like partition commander and or copy commander which boot from the cd and allow for a graphical interface that the newbie can easly use to partition and or multi-boot from. These programs allow you to copy partitions so that you can copy a good clean install into another partition. So that when windoze corrupts to the point that it does not boot or work right, and it will eventualy. You just copy over your saved partion and in 5-10 mins your up and running with a clean install. No lost sleep or kills.

Better yet dont run windoze, run a non-defragmenting OS and lose your headaches forever. You just have to get Hitech to port over to Linux or FreeBSD (MAC), good luck.

Linux is the path to Freedom!!

Vulgar

slimm50 · « **Reply #13 on:** January 21, 2004, 11:12:12 AM »

Anybody seen that tv commercial where the Dad and his kids abduct the computer geek as he's locking up th store? They take him to their home computer and tell him to fix it. Well, I could be that Dad (I'd have to borrow neighbor's kids though). 'Cept, I don't think I'd a let him go, just kept him tied up so's he could be handy to fix all my 'puter ailments.