I am bit confused regarding partitioning, want to confirm it with you smart people.
This is what I would do, correct me please where, IF I am doing any thing wrong.
Hypothetically If the OEM machine has a default HD C & optical drive D.
I would firstly go into CP> Comp Management> Disk Management & change the drive letter of the optical drive to E, will get an error there but shall ignore it.
Reboot the machine.
Than install bootable media of Disk Director version 10 which is Linux based & create 1/2 other primary partitions on HD C.
The change in optical drive’s letter shall be according to the number of new partitions that I would want to create.
Exit from the bootable media & go into windows.
Run CHKDSK for any errors if any, on the Primary Active ie C.
I’ve partitioned on XP and Vista and never renamed any of the existing drives. On one machine the new partition is J and on the other machine it is L.
Joe
My HDD (SATAII) has three partitions, C, E, F with the Optical drive as D.
Now when I got the system it was a single partition C I try to keep my data separate from the windows partition, a) it makes back-up easier up to a point, b) if you have a problem with the C partition you can restore just that partition (drive imaging software). I keep data back-ups, partition image back-ups on the 3rd partition and also back those up to an external HDD, in case of an internal drive failure.
The problem with the drive order is I believe the mix of SATA and IDE with the IDE taking the second drive letter, rather than all partitions in the SATA drive being in order with the IDE optical drive taking the next drive letter.
Yes I believe it is possible to re order the drive lettering (I believe I got similar errors or the re-lettering didn’t stick), but I didn’t spend much time trying to resolve it, I just got used to it.
Thanks DavidR for sharing your personal experiences.
I have to rely on a 3rd party tool rather than windows Disk Management, as the Sony provided XP MCE OEM DVD does not have the option to create partitions from with in windows.
So use this Linux based boot media of Disk Director to create em.
I used Partition Manager (formerly owned by Power Quest) to do mine, XP Pro doesn’t have it either. It is able to resize them whilst in use, provided the space is available.
I use 4 partitions with Windows.
1st System (Windows almost only). Some programs that does not allow changing the installation folder.
2nd Programs (and all installations, most of their settings).
3rd Install, setup, videos, iso files, etc.
4th Documents and Data in a Truecrypt encripted partition.
I should have said Partition Magic (its proper name) from Power Quest.
So this isn’t the same partition magic/manager tool, but it is an alternative as they say to Norton Partition Magic (they, Symantec, bought out Power Quest, Partition Magic and Drive Image applications).
Oops. I found the program only recently and I didn’t know the historical detail of it. - As far as software is concerned, a few year can make an app a history. I still recommend EASEUS Partition Manager, which is quite a powerful utility for the purpose. Guess the name is not so original, though.
I found the program only recently and I didn’t know the historical detail of it. - As far as software is concerned, a few year can make an app a history. I still recommend EASEUS Partition Manager, which is quite a powerful utility for the purpose. Guess the name is not so original, though.