Community poll forum: How many partitions do you have on your primary hard drive?

I separated my drives for some good reasons. #1 when restoring, you do not need too restore your entire photo album to get your PC to boot. Programs and data files do not belong together for many reasons.

A go-back type hard disk time machine should never have access to your data files AND your programs at the same time.

My partitions;


#1 = C drive is for XP and the operating systems and programs.

#2 = D-Drive is my DATA drive. here resides MyDocuments and all my files that need to be backed up, including SYA files such as my contacts and favorites lists and my cookies I want or need. (about 8 cookies at last count)
I also keep all my odd downloads here. some virus scanning and work related programs. the programs are installed on the C: but the ZIP is here
I also keep my e-mail here as that is data as well.
And the properties or configuration files for my programs.


#3 = E drive is my picture storage. here are all my photographs. Anyone who backs up a program and data drive AND their photos is, in my opinion silly. The photos belong on their own CD for obvious reasons.

#4 = F drive. my archival drive that has data from my very first computer as well as some files and programs I've collected along the way. mostly old DOS utilities and some ancient programs that I use now and again for odd reasons. Anyone remember Lucid ? a TSR spreadsheet ?

#5 = G drive, my buffer drive that holds data before writing to a CD. this is my personal preference as the newer burner programs have good file management.

it also holds my scans and camera downloads. I delete and crop here, then copy to the proper place.

I can delete the contents with no worries.

OSX.4
OSX.3
Ubuntu


maybe I'll reformat for more later.

who built my computer said that with 200GB of space I should at least partition it into 2 parts of 100GB each, I am not sure why but that is what was done. I have plenty of space left on the main partition where I keep my software but have already filled the 100GB of space for my own stuff. I have 3 internal hard drives and 3 external hard drives with a total of over 800GB of space and most of that has been filled. I am going to need advice as to what I should do about increasing this amount without too great an expense. I still have 40 hours of VHS tapes to download and over 200 hours of cassette tapes and old 33 and 45 records to rip or download to my hard drive.

No need to have so much stuff on line. How much of that stuff do you actually look at enough to justify having it on HDDs? Don't tell me you're into illegal file sharing... <rolls eyes>

Burn it off onto optical media.

..bh.

I have 3 partition in my computer.

http://www.emanprinting.com/

I have one partition on my first HD now because "my programs" and "my documents" keeps expanding.It is hard to judge beforehand how large to make a partition.I also have a total of four HD's in the computer.

If the operating system dies, you don't lose all your files normally. And if the drive itself takes a crash, it's not going to matter how many partitions you have.

In the event of an OS crash, pull the drive and mount it in another computer, even through a USB interface similar to what you find on external drives. Pull the data, reformat, and rebuild.

One. Partitioning is an anachronism from the olden days when the hard-disk capacity outpaced the operating system address capability. There is no reason for partitioning.

Keep one for applications and less important data, the other partition for gaming, movies and school documents. incase the C:\ gets infected, the other half is still secure (in most cases!)

you should hav multiple partitions for several reasons.
1 Security, makes it harder for hackers to get at sensitive data.
2.Isolates data from programs. You don't lose data if you have to reinstall programs.
3.Separate different types of programs, I like to keep games separate from office or work type programs, keep Halo separate from MS Office.
4. Separate parition for swap file. seems to make windows work better.
5. more efficient use of space on the Hd.
I have 2 disks with a total of 5 partitions +the swap partition.

I consider those who don't partition large drives (unless s/he routinely works with very large files) to be either lazy or clueless. With a little thought (and perhaps a bit of Registry twiddling) you can make your OS partition a lot safer and more reliable. Make your created data more organized, etc. etc.

Just filling things up and buying more HDDs is like these packrats that just keep buying stuff and when their house gets too full, they shovel the excess into rented storage units... Also insane!

If you haven't used something in 6 months, either burn it to optical media, uninstall or delete it!

.bh.

I agree with that. I use a small but very fast HD, generally split into two partitions, to hold the operating systems I use continually.

Everything else goes to seperate drives. At todays prices, averaging about a buck a gig, adding starage is not too much to bear.

When I need to run anything else (Linux, BSD, etc.), well thats what they make virtual machines for. VM Ware usually has betas you can use free, just for the cost of registering. And they even now have a simple container that is free and so easily set up anyone can figure it out. M$ has also set their new and supposedly improved VM free. Typical for M$ though, it's not so easy to set up as VM Ware is.

I have one OS and one partition on my primary hard drive. I need only one partition as I have a skookum filing system. To date, I can find anything on my hard drive in 15 seconds and usually a lot less.

But, of course, I cheat! I have two other hard drives, which I have imaginatively called D: and E:!

I was able to do that because some wag at the factory called my CD drive M: and my DVD drive N:!

I am thinking about a Linux partition, but I don't know if that has to go on the primary, or not. If not, I plan to put it on E: and call it (again, very imaginatively) L:. But that will have to wait a spell as I'm procrastinating about Linux.

I have 2 partitions (one harddrive).
I tend to format my main partition (around 70G) every 2 or 3 months, several reasons each time, and I found it quite tiresome to continuatly download ALL the handy and important software that I need, which is why, instead of backing up that software, I just leave all the install files in the secondary (10G) partition. It's quite a timesaver.