What's the point of a partition?

I think it's just plain stupid for Dell to ship a consumer PC as I saw today on a one year old Inspiron, partitoned with Windows on one 60GB partition (C:) and about 220 GB as an empty D:. And I'm not talking about the small recovery partition, which is a great idea. A data partition is great for a server. But most consumers don't have a clue about partitions or want to, and expect to save all their music in [My] Music, photos in [My] Photos, etc, and Dell even leaves those pointing to C:!. Windows starts at 10-15 GB, WinSxS can grow to 15-20GB, Hibernation, Paging, email cache, etc, and the rest is soon exhausted and they have no idea what to do. Partition all you like if you know what you're doing. But there's a reason that all your relatives are asking you if they please just buy a Mac, and every movie you see has mostly Macs, and it isn't just the pretty cases: Their number one design goal is to keep it simple for the user, and the only time a typical Mac user has to mess with partitions is when they try to install Boot Camp.
As far as getting the data off the system partition; if you know what you're doing, it's nothing to pull the data off before you reinstall, unless the partition table is trashed, in which case you're going to have just as much trouble with your data partition. And if you don't have a clue what you're doing, you'd better be seeking help or you're just as likely to trash your data partition in the process, or install Windows on top of it.

Welcome to Seven Forum, avalonnyc.

Really! A little effort to learn about partitions and you would know most of it in a day or two. And then you shall never regret having made the effort. Begin by reading here Disk partitioning - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The biggest use of partitions is that when your Main Drive (system volume) packs up due to any reason like say a virus attack, your data shall still remain safe on another partition.

But first, you have revived an old thread. Please begin by starting a thread of your own. You shall get many more help and suggestions if you do so.

Thanks wanchoo, but I have been creating partitions since before Windows; in fact, before DOS. My first hard drive was 10mb, cost over $2000, and I had to write the Z80 code to allow the BIOS to access it. And I guess I've made a pretty good living since then in this field.