[Olaf van der Spek]

Screwdriver, on Aug 17 2004, 10:40 PM, said:

What would happen if he ran a copy of windows prior to XP SP1?

Pre-SP1 versions only see 128 gb and no amount of partitioning solves that.

And he should upgrade anyway.

[Olaf van der Spek]

> What if he partitioned the 160GB drive in half (or fouth)

He'd think at a certain point in time when he's out of space: "Why did I fragment my free space?".

[Gilbo]

Screwdriver, on Aug 17 2004, 05:40 PM, said:

one 160GB partition?

What would happen if he ran a copy of windows prior to XP SP1?

Screwdriver, versions of XP prior to SP1 will gag on the full capacity of the drive no matter how many partitions he divides it up into.

In fact, if he did manage to set things up with multiple <137GB partitions (well, 128GB normal-human-speak, 137GB hard-drive-marketing-speak ), the original poster would get to experience one of the more interesting forms of data corruption to which Windows users are prone. There are several examples in the archives of situations where users have partitioned their disks using LBA-aware tools like Partition Magic, installed Windows and watched the data corruption fly. Windows will see the partitions and read the tables and look very happy. It will then merrily bounce every request >137GB right on top of the data at the beginning of the disk, making things very interesting for the data recovery tools .

Quote

What if he partitioned the 160GB drive in half (or fourth), and used the first half (or fourth) for all normally used files, such as O/S, programs, dat, and reserved the second half for infrequenly-used files, such as downloads, back-ups, drivers? Wouldn't that prevent the drive from seeking to the far end of the disk during normal system operation, thereby minimizing seek/access times and speeding things up?

There are a thousand contrivances one could develop to try and minimize the additional seeking penalties. In the end, the penalties are inherent to the design so, while you can minimize them, you can't eliminate them entirely.

The real question should be, if partitioning isn't necessary in the first place, why on earth would you bother?

[Gilbo]

Olaf van der Spek, you beat me to it.

[Screwdriver]

Olaf van der Spek, on Aug 17 2004, 02:55 PM, said:

Screwdriver, on Aug 17 2004, 10:40 PM, said:

What would happen if he ran a copy of windows prior to XP SP1?

Pre-SP1 versions only see 128 gb and no amount of partitioning solves that.

And he should upgrade anyway.

That was basically my point..

[sechs]

Gilbo, on Aug 17 2004, 03:07 PM, said:

The real question should be, if partitioning isn't necessary in the first place, why on earth would you bother?

Organization. And really, there are only a few really good organizational reasons -- to install different OSes or to use different file systems are the only ones of which I can thing.

[HisMajestyTheKing]

sechs, on Aug 18 2004, 06:42 AM, said:

Gilbo, on Aug 17 2004, 03:07 PM, said:

The real question should be, if partitioning isn't necessary in the first place, why on earth would you bother?

Organization. And really, there are only a few really good organizational reasons -- to install different OSes or to use different file systems are the only ones of which I can thing.

And to keep your OS and software on one partition and data on another. Makes it easier to reinstall the OS from scratch if something goes horribly wrong.

[Sivar]

Olaf van der Spek, on Aug 17 2004, 04:55 PM, said:

Screwdriver, on Aug 17 2004, 10:40 PM, said:

What would happen if he ran a copy of windows prior to XP SP1?

Pre-SP1 versions only see 128 gb and no amount of partitioning solves that.

And he should upgrade anyway.

Why not
1) set "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Atapi\Parameters\ EnableBigLba" to "1"
2) Resize with Partition Magic or some other partition management tool?
(I've heard there are free ones for Windows now)

[Christer]

Hi guys!

When I bought my BOAC (Box Of Assembled Components - not OEM) the harddrive was in one single 40 GB partition with Windows ME preinstalled. I wanted to use Ghost so, I split the harddrive in 8 GB System partition, 24 GB Data partition and 8 GB Ghost partition.

When everything was reinstalled on the new smaller System partition, the computer felt faster and more responsive.

You will have a hard time convincing me that the size of the System partition doesn't have an impact on speed and responsiveness!

Christer

[Olaf van der Spek]

Sivar, on Aug 18 2004, 09:32 AM, said:

Why not
1) set "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Atapi\Parameters\ EnableBigLba" to "1"

On pre-SP1?
AFAIK pre-SP1 doesn't support LBA48 at all and >= SP1 doesn't use that value.