New
#41
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.