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Basic partition question


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im fairly new to this, but i currently have two 1.5tb hdd's. one of them has a 50gb partition for windows, and is otherwise about 90% full. the other is about half full.

i want to put a 100gb partition on the second drive, to boot windows from, and eliminate the first poartition on the other drive.

ive heard though, that partitioning a hard drive when its already got lots of files can be bad. obviously i want the new boot partition to be near the centre of the disc for quicker access to the page file, etc.

are there risks here? is there anything i need to know in regards to optimizing my disk access for booting?

i do have acronis' disk director quite at my disposal.

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near the center of the disk? you want it near the edge of the disk (the first partition).

there are definitely risks such as if you lose power during the operation, the drive could fail under the heavy load it may be under.

this process may also take a very long time.

i would highly suggest just getting another smaller hdd purely for the OS and leaving your 1.5TBs to be purely storage drives.

when you have this much data your #1 concern should be the safety of those files.

so i wouldn't risk the integrity of those files by messing around with an OS on the same disk.

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Well I had a friend tell me that you shouldn't even partition your hard drives. Because it can make them more prone to failure. So I'm just going to get a couple hard drives and make one for operating system and programs, then I would have to the second drive for data. But that's my opinion.

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For me, I have a 160gb HDD that only has my OS on it and my downloaded programs from the internet. I have my 1tb external drive which holds my data and all my music! This way if my Main HDD crashes or fails, I'm not losing my data. But if it's the other way around, I'm pretty much stuck in a hole.

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I do it all the time, I tend to have 3 different OS installed in one hdd. I use GParted to delete, create and resize partitions. Though I never leave important data on the same harddrive.

Edit: Actually now that I think about it, Windows Vista and 7's Disk Management has shrinking feature that can resize your partition. You can just use that.

The GParted way:

For the 1st hdd, you can use GParted to delete the Windows partition, then resize the 90% partition back to 100%. The thing is if you resize a partition and files within the partition has to be moved across the hdd aswell, then the resizing process will takes a very long time with 1.5TB of datas. Because if XP partition was to the left and got deleted, the 90% partition is expanding itself to the left, GParted also will move all files within the partition to the left.

For the 2nd hdd, you can shrink it and leave 100gb of free space in the end of the hdd, then create a new partition out of that free space.

Edited by eksasol
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I'd use Partiton Magic to make that 100Gig partition on the 2nd drive then use any imaging tool to (ghost...) copy the 50 on the 100. Then swap the drives boot order. Then reuse PM to reclaim the 50 on the 1st drive.

I've been very impressed by PM8 that I used lately at work. It is 10 TIMES faster than GPartEd, I kid you not. Plus, it makes most operation from within the running OS, no reboot, no media needed. Only advantage of GPartEd is that it is free.

Well I had a friend tell me that you shouldn't even partition your hard drives. Because it can make them more prone to failure.
If he can't explain why, sorry but I take that as a pointless statement.
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I'd use Partiton Magic to make that 100Gig partition on the 2nd drive then use any imaging tool to (ghost...) copy the 50 on the 100. Then swap the drives boot order. Then reuse PM to reclaim the 50 on the 1st drive.

I've been very impressed by PM8 that I used lately at work. It is 10 TIMES faster than GPartEd, I kid you not. Plus, it makes most operation from within the running OS, no reboot, no media needed. Only advantage of GPartEd is that it is free.

Well I had a friend tell me that you shouldn't even partition your hard drives. Because it can make them more prone to failure.
If he can't explain why, sorry but I take that as a pointless statement.

ya gparted will take an extremely long time when trying to perform actions on the first partition on a very full drive, it's ridiculous at times.

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Well I had a friend tell me that you shouldn't even partition your hard drives.

I had a friend telling me that elefants fly, but I was never able to spot one :(, maybe because I was using my binoculars upside down :unsure:, or because I don't live in Africa or India.

:whistle:

jaclaz

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I mean I had my WD 250gig Sata hard drive for almost 5 years and it's been partitioned a ton of time and reformatted a ton of time and it hasn't failed yet.

Or another good example is I have a 120GB Maxtor ATA drive that I bought in 2001 that has been partitioned and still works fine! However perhaps the difference is that HDD's partitions are both for data. OS still on another physical drive.

Its a "best practice" to have OS on a separate physical disk, and data on (an)other(s). Even better practice is separate physical drives on different controllers. Example, our Domain Controller has 2 drives on RAID1 on onboard controller for OS, and 8 drives on RAID10 on 3Ware card for data.

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For me, I have a 160gb HDD that only has my OS on it and my downloaded programs from the internet. I have my 1tb external drive which holds my data and all my music! This way if my Main HDD crashes or fails, I'm not losing my data. But if it's the other way around, I'm pretty much stuck in a hole.
I would get another 1TB hdd and make a second copy of the datas. I have a 3.5mm thing where it can insert two 2.5" harddrives. Once a while I insert a 2.5" back up and sync all the important datas with SyncToy, then eject the harddrive.

The stupidest thing that can happen in this case would be to accidentally reverse backup process and tells SyncToy to overwrite the newer datas with old datas, also to delete all new datas not existing in the backup harddrive.

If there is a project you are working on for thousand of hours and then completely lost it :wacko:

Edited by eksasol
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For me, I have a 160gb HDD that only has my OS on it and my downloaded programs from the internet. I have my 1tb external drive which holds my data and all my music! This way if my Main HDD crashes or fails, I'm not losing my data. But if it's the other way around, I'm pretty much stuck in a hole.
I would get another 1TB hdd and make a second copy of the datas. I have a 3.5mm thing where it can insert two 2.5" harddrives. Once a while I insert a 2.5" back up and sync all the important datas with SyncToy, then eject the harddrive.

The stupidest thing that can happen in this case would be to accidentally reverse backup process and tells SyncToy to overwrite the newer datas with old datas, also to delete all new datas not existing in the backup harddrive.

If there is a project you are working on for thousand of hours and then completely lost it :wacko:

Yeah, I have been thinking about getting another 1tb external to make a back up of my original files on my main external. Does that make sense? lol

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