How To Partition My Hard Drive?

[kkengvibul]

Help please!

[Totster]

Do you really want to ??

It can be a pain in the backside in the future..

totster

[kkengvibul]

well yes...

my friend just bought a laptop and it has only one hard disk drive...

wouldnt it be better to have two?

[stumonster]

there are ongoing discussions on this page of the forum about the necessity of partitioning a hard drive with this generation of operating systems. you might want to have a read of the posts. also partitioning does not give you 2 hard drives .

usually you use fdisk and format under dos to partition before you load the os on the system , but you can also use programs such as partition magic to resize/ add partitions after the operating system is installed. its advisable to back up to an external drive or dvd anything important before you attempt any partitioning.

[appleman_thai]

use a program called partition magic. Its the best of them all.

[briley]

Agree with totster - why partition?

And if you don't know how to then you shouldn't mess! Partitioning does not give you two hard drives as kkengvibul suggested.

Partition magic is good, but can go wrong and is not easy to use. If it goes wrong you can lose everything.

[Artisan]

I can only give my support to previous posters. Don't do it! As the notebook computer is new, it will have, or should have, a decently sized hard drive. If your friend wants a second hard drive, then an external 120 GB drive, plus case, isn't too expensive and is ultra-portable.

Partitioning, can its after effects, can be a pain in the posterior.

[JSixpack]

well yes...

my friend just bought a laptop and it has only one hard disk drive...

wouldnt it be better to have two?

It would, but w/ a laptop the second physical drive will have to be external. If you've got the dosh, you might just get one of those convenient "one-touch" backup drives.

You won't gain anything really by partitioning, and it does have some disadvantages and potential pitfalls, so don't bother. If your OS or your disk goes south, you probably just have a restore disk (typical with laptops) that will wipe out everything, including your extra partitions, when you restore, if it comes to that.

Just be sure you do regular backups of anything important, whether to an external hard drive or to CD/DVD.

[katana]

I found these guides useful when partitioning a hard drive:

http://fdisk.radified.com/

http://partition.radified.com/

Edited April 8, 2006 by katana