Windows 7: Help with Partitions

Hi, I have something quite trivial (especially for a 14 year old like me...). I was helping my friend out the other day with some partitions on a second hard drive when I noticed he had some extra partitions on his disk.



I self built my PC and I don't have any of these partitions and before you say my friend has OEM partitions, I know there not, we found them and got rid of them, things like 'HP_TOOLS' and stuff.

One of them is WinRE which I think is quite important. Whereas on mine I just have one big partition which makes me think that I have my WinRE in the same partition as Windows. Infact I have everything in this one partition (see attached pic). Something tells me this isn't very safe.

Should I be doing something about this, like moving things onto different partitions? Cause I see screenshots of people's drives where they have those things in brackets (System, Active, Page File and such like). Just some advice would be good

That is fine, it`s the best way to use all your space. You could break it into 2 or 3 partitions if you want to. 1 for all your data and 1 for a system image.

Use Partition Wizard.

An example of 2 hard drives.

OK, So if I wanted to, since this kind of fits under the title, change the partitions say to have C;\Windows in one partition and then maybe have program files and data and things in another. Possibly even another HDD or SDD.

You want windows and all your installed programs on the same partition. C: Once you create the other partitions, you can put whatever you want on them.

The whole reason for doing it is, if windows gets messed up or if you just want to reinstall, you don`t have to worry about loosing your data or all of your program installers.

But more importantly, to put a disk image on.

Hope you made the Recovery disks first.



Did you make the OEM manufacturer's Recovery Disks?

How to make HP Recovery DVD disks:
Performing an HP System Recovery (Windows Vista) | HP® Support

You can Order HP Recovery Disks from here:
Country-Language Selector | HP® Support

Something to keep in mind...with a partitioned drive, if that drive fails, all the data is lost. The only time I partition a drive is for testing other OS's. Other than that I use separate drives for data storage and backups...but that's just me. Others will have different opinions.

For sake of argument, we`re only talking 1 drive in this example.

But... Always backup what you don`t want to loose.

So if I have just one hard drive, the only real use for partitions is to put Windows WITH program files onto its own partition so if Windows fails I only lose that?

No that was on my friends laptop that I helped him recover the hard drive. Although I really should look into getting some kind of backup. I have none whatsoever so if HDD dies completely I am screwed. :/

So it doesn't matter if WinRE is on the same partition as Windows then, because if the drive goes, even if it's on a different partition it won't work anyway.

Question #1 Yes

I don't have anything TOO valuable on here. Mostly games and a couple of pieces of Adobe stuff. But I know where all my license keys and things are for these and all my games are from Steam so I can get them anywhere. I know it's not very good practice or a good attitude but I don't have much data storage space in my house.