What's the point of a partition?

DarkStar GT said:

CommonTater said:

By way of agreeing with Bill2...

I always partition my drives... My main workstation looks like this...

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The reason for this is that should anything happen in the system drive, the chances of my Data and Archive drives being affected is quite low. But you need a way to conveniently access these drives...

The Archive drive is simple... I just made a desktop link for it and manage the files there manually.

The Data drive is a wee bit more complicated. What I did there was to make the folders I needed (Music, Video, Pictures, Electronics, Programming, etc.) and then I relocated the "My Whatever" folders from my user account to the data drive...

Attachment 65511

Next I Dragged my username out of the start menu and onto the desktop, which creates a shortcut to my home folder. In that folder I also created extra shortcuts to the various folders that were not "My Whatever" and I use my home folder as a launch point for the entire system....

Attachment 65513

That sounds like a plan to me. :) 15GB for the System Disk? I guess your PageFile is elsewhere too.

Ok, good point... a small note about my system, just to clarify... I don't use pagefiles (as in turned off), I don't use automatic updates (Service Packs will do), I don't use System Restore, and I removed a whole lot of crap (Voice recognition, natural language search, media center, windows media player, language support, etc) from the system before it even hit the drive.

For you're average W7 Pro or Ultimate install I would recommend 50gb in the System Partition....

Bare Foot Kid said:

Hello Valor D, welcome to Seven Forums!




Hopefully the partition that you had the "Geeksquad" remove was not the only option you had to use the "Factory Recovery" program to recover your PC in case of failure as some manufactures only send you a disk to access the recovery partition and now you won't have that available to you.

he can always make his own recovery disc.

I haven't seen the drive, obviously, I assume if you have a recovery partition it is an additional one of 10gb or less.

It seems very sensible it was pre partitioned for you in that way.

As many have pointed out - there are lots of advantages in having the operating system ( and installed apps.) on one partition - and your data on a separate partition(s).

Much easier, quicker, and less work for the drive when doing maintenance tasks- defrag, checkdisk, etc.

Also much easier and quicker to make backup images.

Also massively better if you need to reinstall/restore an image. Your data partitions should remain untouched.


You might want to recreate that partition , no need to pay someone to do it , it's pretty easy.

Anyone here will explain how.

Lanthus20 said:

Bare Foot Kid said:

Hello Valor D, welcome to Seven Forums!




Hopefully the partition that you had the "Geeksquad" remove was not the only option you had to use the "Factory Recovery" program to recover your PC in case of failure as some manufactures only send you a disk to access the recovery partition and now you won't have that available to you.

he can always make his own recovery disc.

Not if the recovery partition is gone.

I believe Dell still supply a reinstallation dvd. I have one from a while back.