New laptop, should I partition??

maryc said:

Hi, bought new Acer laptop with 320gb hard drive. Still in the box at the moment! Dont want to make a mistake so need to know whether I should partition this drive and if so what size, also if Win 7 is capable of doing this. Havent done this before so simple answer/instructions please! Thanks very much.

Hi maryc

Take note of Dwarf & make them Recovery DVD's first.

You will find that Acer's install program will partition your drive on FIRST START UP.

I would say, if it works DO NOT PLAY.

Using Defraggler ... Defrag the HDD.
Using Shrink in disc management .. I'd shrink the C drive to something like 80 gig for W7
Using Disc management .. Make a new partition in the unallocated space for your data storage.

Any surgery on the HDD is risky .. make sure you have everything backed up first.

What are you Imaging the HHD with ???
The new Acronis now supports Windows 7.

I'm not sure how it handles the reserved Partition ... I removed it.

noyb said:

What are you Imaging the HHD with ???
The new Acronis now supports Windows 7.

I'm not sure how it handles the reserved Partition ... I removed it.

I read some bad things about Acronis & Windows 7 (although I still use it on my XP & Vista machines) so I have used Partition Wizard 4.1 which seems to have worked flawlessly.

Andrew

I wouldn't go less than 50GB on C. And 80 is probably safer.

I don't forsee any need to do more than 2 partitions (C drive for OS and D drive for data, apps, entertainment, music, etc). Often having more than 2 partitions just makes things more complicated unncessarily.

I agree with PParks about the number of partitions. There is no point to being overly complex with a bunch of partitions. If you get into 4 or 5 partitions, you can pretty much count on running low on space in one of them and then be faced with resizing, reallocating, etc.

If I understand you correctly, your intent is to make an image of your system and place it on another partition on the same drive.

Not a good move.

What happens if that drive fails?

You wouldn't be able to get at your image.

Better than nothing, but far from ideal.

Standard recommendation: get another drive (internal or external) and put images and backed up data in general on it.

Hi there

ALWAYS SEPARATE the OS from the data.

1) Easier to backup and restore. You don't lose your data when restoring the OS.
(store the image on a DIFFERENT drive - preferably a network drive so you can restore it if you have to from another machine). A bootable backup is also a good idea.

Even a LARGISH W7 installation shouldn't need more than around 30 GB (and that's a largish installation) for the Windows partition -- but disk space is cheap so give it 40 GB.

2) Easier to MOVE your data to a network / other machine without any probs of having to re-install an OS. Just think what you would have to do if your music for example was on the OS disk and Windows crashed forcing you to re-format the entire drive.

'nuf said.

cheers
jimbo

maryc said:

Hi, bought new Acer laptop with 320gb hard drive. Still in the box at the moment! Dont want to make a mistake so need to know whether I should partition this drive and if so what size, also if Win 7 is capable of doing this. Havent done this before so simple answer/instructions please! Thanks very much.

I also have a new laptop and took the plunge. I have a 500GB hard drive and I want to dual boot Linux. I first used Windows 7 defragger; took around fifteen minutes. I backed up everything. I then created an Administrator account. Then I logged on as Administrator and opened up Computer management and Disk Management; right clicked C drive and selected "Shrink" and went for it. It did a default shrink to about half the size. I then created a 160GB partition for backups and the rest for Linux. Haven't loaded Linux yet. All went without a hitch.

Regards, Allan

What's the point? That is what libraries are for.