Hard Drives.
 

My question is do I partition or not? I have a 300GB SATA150 drive waiting to go in my PC ready for a clean Windows XP installation. The old 160GB IDE will be going into another PC.

If I should partition, how many and what sizes?

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300 at 1gb each :) was that what was in my vestibule earlier ??

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Yes. Thats why I did not tell you. You might have kept it :D

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partition or not to partition...?

NO

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Yes,
At least seperate your OS/Programs from your data. That way if/when you want to reinstall/upgrade your OS your data is kept seperate and doesn't get touched when you trash the OS partition. I would assume you are using NTFS as well, If you are using FAT32 you could end up with clusters taht are inefficient particularly if you have lots of smaller files.


Having one partition is a recipie for disaster IMHO. There is no benefit to having a single enormous partition with todays disk sizes.

In Neils case I would have a primary partition of ~30-40 Gig and a 250ish data partition. (Well, in truth I'd have a 10 gig windows, a 250 gig data and a 15 gig Gentoo Linux :O )

Ian

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Thats what I have at the mo with my currect drive - except the Linux
You would install all the windows programs on the windows partition I take it.
My data, as in my documents are on another PC acting as a server anyway.
Maybe I will try a Linux partition. Would you create the 3 partitions during the windows install from a clean drive? Partition 1 windows, 2 for data and 3 for linux?

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Don't partition and use a seperate smaller drive for your os. Partitioning leads to easily made deleting mistakes! :)

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I would do the following,

Start Windows install, do custom disk partitioning. create a main Windows Partition (primary partition, As you say for windows and all programs) of 30Gig, create the data partition(another primary partition of 210 gig) and leave the rest of the disk as unallocated space at this point.

Complete the windows install as normal. Add whatever you so desire to Windows at this point.

If you are a newbie Linux user I would recommend starting with Mandriva Linux (DVD iso here http://www.mirror.ac.uk/mirror/sunsi...-DVD.i586.iso). When you install this it will ask you if you wish to use unallocated space. You can do this or choose custom partitioning and do it yourself. Linux uses a minimum of 2 partitions, preferably 3 ( / or 'root' a 'swap' partition and a 'home' partition )

Feel free to ask if you want me to pop round to walk you through the first install but to be honest its easier than a windows install, its just that you do all OS, Apps and drivers in one swoop rather than in seperate steps as you do in Windows.(It only takes a single reboot at the end of teh install and its all up and working.)

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Thanks Ian I think I will have a go.
That is a good idea Roy but I want the older drive for anoth machine. I also want to leave 1 IDE port for DVD-ROM and the other for DVD-RW. I am finding it slow ripping from DVD when the DVD-ROM is slaved with the hard drive as master.

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Neil,
make sure DMA is turned on for all drives as this will slow down DVD ripping/playback. DMA allows the data to transfer from DVD to HD/memory without requiring any CPU cycles to do it. Hence massive improvement in performance

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DMA is on mate. I have hard drive and DVD-ROM on the same cable. I think it is slow copying from dvd to disk becasue it is on the same cable. My DVD-RW is on its own cable and is a lot faster. It might just be the DVD-ROM is slow but hey are both only a month old and the same make. I will know when I use the SATA drive

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Is there any benefit in partitioning a 250GB secondry external HD? The original is an 80GB IDE. Does the disc fragment less if it's partitioned?

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If its just a data drive then probably not. It does depend on what filesystem you use. NTFS will be no problem, I can't remember the cluster size of Fat32 when you get to that size of drive, I'll have a dig about when I have a minute spare. I would recommend NTFS over FAT though.

One thing about fragmentation to consider though is that if you set Windows to defrag it a 250gig partition would take AGES, you can do 2x 120 gig partitions in turn rather than in one swoop.

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Ah, I see, it's NTFS. How does it work are the partitions treated as individual drives then, are they given a letter each?

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I'm thinking I should have split it now into two at least, one part for films the other for pictures and gif's

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Effectively yes, from a windows POV each partition is given its own letter so to most people it is seen as a 'seperate' hard disk.

Linux does filesystems in a far more logical way. everything starts at / (or root) there is a defined set of sub folders, some read only, some read/write. the list is bin, boot, dev, etc, home, lib, mnt, opt, proc, root, sbin, sys, tmp, usr, var

You can 'mount' a partition anywhere on the tree, so for example, under /home is where people have their 'My Documents' so /home/entwisi is mine, /home/buttonsmum is Julie's. There is no reason that my 'folder' has to be on the same partition as julies.

Its sounds a bit strange to people who have only ever used Windows but in reality it is far easier to manage. e.g. lets say /home is nearly full with mine and Julies stuff, and I want to create an account for Siobhan. I can just stick another disk in and put her account on there and just 'mount' it at /home/siobhan. Job done, no copying of data here there or anywhere.

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Never used linux. I bought a disk once, gaming edition and never installed it, I didn't think you could have two opperating systems on the same machine. It's probably too old to use now, but I understand its free anyway.

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Windows doesn't like you having two OS's Linux however will happily coexist with anything.

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I have just starting copying 80GB of recorded movies from my Dreambox which is Linux based to my PC via FTP. Is there a windows utility to allow windows to read a Linux formatted drive?

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Depends what filesystem you ar eusing under linux. ext2/3 can be read. There is some support for ReiserFS as well. One other option is to set up Samba on teh linux box and expose the drives as shares. Windows can then see the files just like any other shared drives.

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ext3 I think. I don't want to mess with the DReambox while it is very busy ftp ing. It does support samba but I have never got round to setting it up. It is copying faster than I thought. 80 GB and it is saying about 2 hours. When I swop the Hard Drive in the Dreambox I will have to copy it back.

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Upgrading it eh?

Get samba setup, its not that hard, shout if you need help

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Just a thought, can teh dreambox not support two HDs internaly? Even if it meant leaving teh case of whislt you copied everything across?

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No it can only take 1 HD. The other ide channel has a compact flash reader permantly on it.

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IDE Channels support two devices each or do you mean there is only one ide channel with disk as master and cf as slave?

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yep 1 channel. Maybe when I have Linux on my my machine I will be able to copy from the Dreambox drive to my PC using my USB2 to IDE adapter

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To quote the ad, 'there is another way!'

What filesystem do you use under Windows? NTFS or FAT?

Definately if FAT you could just boot a LiveCD such as knoppix and use your USB/IDE adaptor. NTFS is slightly more risky, I would want to dump it onto an empty partition if possible just to be safe(or ghost the drive first. NTFS write support is out there but is not as advanced in development as FAT support.

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NTFS. So are you telling me I wont be able to access the 180GB NTFS partition I have created when I stick Linux on the 16GB I have unused at the moment? I have also been toying with running Linux on my server ish machine that has 3 120GB NTFS drives in it :(

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??????? sorry just thought I would lighten the thread with a blonde moment, hee hee:p :D :p :D ;) ;) ;)

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Say something thick then

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Ooops the moment was that blonde I couldn't think of anything thick to say!!! ;) anyway I will leave now before I get my hand slapped for thread wandering... partitions was it??? :p

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Yeah, but not the sort in blonde hair :p

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You can, it just requires a little extra configuration. NTFS is basically a closed system so people have to 'cheat' slightly in order to support wrote access. They effectively use the windows dll's to con the filesystem into thinking it is windows that is trying to write to it.