Looking for advice on partitions

Avien said:

Is this for backup purposes?

No. I have Acronis and an external HD like Tw33k. This is mainly for doing a clean install of Win7... I'd like to keep the all-day app-disk shuffle blues to a minimum.

Any chance you can move your old 20gb to a newer bigger HDD?

The old 20 Gb HD is in my old desktop; I only mentioned it as an excuse for my noobness on this subject. I'm gonna move a few more files from it, and then install some version of Linux on it. I want to see what it is like. I wanna be inept in as many OS's as possible!

You could just install Windows 7 on a C partition, then everything you install from there on out do a custom install and point it to the d driver instead. Only way i can think of doing it, and that is how i used to do it, until i realized it wasn't worth it.

Dzomlija said:

I like to keep all my programs and other system files on the C: partition.

But of course, hard drives are very cheap these days and partitioning a drive doesn't really make too much sense at all. I find it far more flexible to rather install another drive, and then move all important personal files (documents, pictures, music, etc) to a completely seperate physical drive.

Just have a look at my system specs. One of the 80GB drive is my system boot drive, with all the other containing my documents and other stuff.

Eventually I'm going in that direction too... but not for a few months. I'd love to get one of those velociraptors for the OS, but a few other expenses are more pressing right now. Soon, though... soon...

tw33k said:

the question i have is: do you want just the os on c: and everything else on d:?

If that is possible, and it'll function w/o a big loss in speed, that might be the way I'll go.

There's so many different options... so many different opinions and reasons...

Avien said:

You could just install Windows 7 on a C partition, then everything you install from there on out do a custom install and point it to the d driver instead. Only way i can think of doing it, and that is how i used to do it, until i realized it wasn't worth it.

Does that make a clean install of the official Win7 harder?

Not at all. It just requires you to make sure when you install any third party applications, like firefox, thunderbird, quicktime, itunes, etc... to change the directory of the installation to D:\Program Files\....... from C:\Program Files\....

OK... so to sum up, I won't gain anything by moving third party programs to the D partition, and when I do the clean install of Win7 on C the other programs on C will be OK?

I ask because I have a few paid-for programs that limit me to three machines, and I've already installed them on two. I've been holding off on installing them on my Win7 machine because I don't want to use up the final activation of their keys, and then be up the creek when Win7 comes out.