Partitions Advice

[Lyrrad]

Hi

I know how to make/erase/change partitions. However i don't really understand what the point of them is. Perhaps someone could explain.

[tommyt]

Partitions are useful for data storage, dual booting, imaging purposes, etc. You can partition a single drive in to two (or more) partitions. The two partitions will appear as two seperate drives. If you install the OS on the primary the secondary partition can be used as you like.

[Lyrrad]

Partitions are useful for data storage, dual booting, imaging purposes, etc. You can partition a single drive in to two (or more) partitions. The two partitions will appear as two seperate drives. If you install the OS on the primary the secondary partition can be used as you like.

Yeah I know that can be done. However I have a second 500GB drive dedicated for my files, and an external USB 500gb drive for mp3/avi. So my main drive is 120gb and used only for OS/programs.

Is there any reason to partition that drive or to partition a drive so part has audio and the other partition video and also is there an advantage to put windows on 1 partition and other programs on another.

[chroma]

Partitions are essentialy virtual filesystems that act as independant disks.

They're very useful in linux where you can have an independant disk for everything off of your root. say a partition for /usr /var /bin /boot /home /usr /etc /lib /swap and so forth, this means that everything is independantly isolated from each other and should one part become corrupt you can easily adjust things to keep you running without having to perform any serious maintainance.

in windows they're only really useful for keeping your windows install on one partition and everything else on other partitions.
That way should your windows partition get infected with a virus for instance, you can format that partition and keep everything else intact, programs will still need to be reinstalled after setup though.

They're also good for running multiple operating systems, say having a boot partition that loads up a bootloader like grub or lilo and allows you to specify which partition to boot up next to load the operating system on that particular partition.

another use is to keep multiple filesystems on a disk, say a removable drive that will be used in multiple systems with different operating systems. you could set up a partition for windows (fat32 / ntfs) for linux (ext3, reiserfs, nfs etc) or other operating systems like BeOS (BFS) Solaris (ufs, procfs, tmpfs, mntfs) or IRIX (xfs, EFS) which means you can essentialy port things between operating systems.

[Lyrrad]

in windows they're only really useful for keeping your windows install on one partition and everything else on other partitions.
That way should your windows partition get infected with a virus for instance, you can format that partition and keep everything else intact, programs will still need to be reinstalled after setup though.

Out of interest does it effect things if you make the partition size so small that the windows install takes up say 98% of that partition (in other words do you get the same slowing down of things when a physical drive is 98% full).

[chroma]

not if you specify another partition for your pagefiles.

in a nutshell, windows uses more memory than is physicaly available (to store common dll's and config files etc) so it assigns a portion of your hard drive as virtual memory.

think about it like playing a game with a walkthrough printed and sat next to you on your desk. if you fill the desk up with clutter then to make spece you'll robably put the walkthrough back on a shelf. which means next time you need to use it you'll need to rummage through your shelf rather than just pick it off the desk.

once you fill up a hard drive then the space left for adittional virtual memory is gone so windows cant keep everythng stored in a place for quick reference.

you can assign more space in different locations by right clicking on "my computer" getting to advanced settings then configuring the performance page.