partitioning advice

B

Bubba

Guest
I usually keep just one partition on my computer. I've ordered a 120 gb WD and have a few questions.

1) Can my Windows 98 boot disk format and partition this drive ok?

2) If I had more than one partition could I backup my Windows partition to a second partion and restore it good as new whenever I wanted? I've used Ghost to back up the whole thing before, but never just one partition.

3) Will more than one partition wear out my drive faster?

4) What do you think of WD drives?

Thanks.
 
1. It should, do a full format, not /q, it will take a while, but if the drives got problems, they should start showing up right away.

2. Yes. Ghost is perfect for that, get everything you normally install, Office, Antivirus, etc, then make a ghost copy, just specify the destination as another fat32 partition, and you're good to go to restore it anytime.

3. No, I don't think so. What wears out in a drive is either the bearings, which aren't going to care how many partitions you have, or the head crashes into the platter, which again, isn't going to matter how many partitions you have.

4. I think they're cute. :D
 
I dont know if a 98 disk will recognize the whole drive. You might have to search for an updated boot disk or something...
 
Good point, might see up to 32GB i think, if you've got a win 2000 disk you can partiton it to manageable chunks otherwise use a third party partioning tool etc..
 
I'm thinking it might be ok because I used this disk to fdisk/ format my 80 gb maxtor. If not, I might have to see if WD has a utility to do that stuff.
 
I thought that was more a bios limitation, but I could be wrong.
 
FAT16 has a partition limit of 2gb with a physical disk limit of 8gb

FAT32 has a partition limit of either 128gb or 137gb (i forget which one), it's the BIOS limitation that can sometimes limit you to 32gb
 
Does NTFS have a limit? Does it have any advantages for the average user like me?
 
If you're using Win2k or XP, I'd do ntfs. Smaller cluster sizes, less slack space, seems like a little better performance overall.
 
No, but any version of Windows before Windows XP SP1 will not be able to format a partition larger than 137gb (Postal made a big thread on it some time ago...)
 
Someone throw me a bone, it is 1:43AM, Justin is in the guts of a computer and ranting about fans and i'm confused what fat and ghosts has to do with computers!
 
Fat= File Allocation Table Basically, it tells the computer where to look for the files on the hard drive thingy.

NTFS NT File System, Does the same thing, but differently.
 
computer have ghosts in them, they help run messages from some parts of the computer to others and play their music onthe soundcard when no-one is looking. some ghosts are fatter than others, if your ghost is fatter you need a bigger hard disk because its bum has outgrown the smaller ones.
when a computer says it is out of memory it really means the ghost has forgotten what you asked it to do, the mouse is tired and wants a rest and you need to reinstall aol.
ntfs is loony speak, no-one knows what it means but we all talk about it to look cool.
 
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