Partitioning large HD under XP

[Geoff Beale]

I too have just bought a Maxtor. Guess what the small print on the label says -- Made in the USA by SEAGATE !!

Do you still stand by your assertion that Seagate drives are more reliable?

[Andy Hall]

I was referring to Maxtor drives that originated or their technology or manufacturing predate their acquisition 18 months ago by Seagate as being less reliable.

Therefore, unless you know exactly which Maxtor product or technology it is, the brand is better avoided.

[Dave Baker]

Yes

No. Much better to have program files on C along with windows.

I seem to

I partition my 250 gb disk into a 20gb C drive for Windows and program files and the rest as a D drive for data. I also didn't have SP1/2 when I first installed XP a couple of years ago but as I recall I partitioned the hard drive and formatted the 20gb part, installed XP, then downloaded SP1/2 and finally formatted the 230gb D drive before putting any data on it once the system could properly recognise partitions > 127gb. I didn't need to create an XP cd with SP1/2 already on it but I have one now anyway and it does make life simpler.

20 gb as a C drive is ample for XP and any programs. I'm only using about 8gb of that with a pretty average range of programs installed.

[Pete C]

Hi,

One other thing, once XP/SP2 installed and set up to how you like it, take an 'image' of it and put on data partition and DVDR.

It should only be one or two gig so won't take up much space.

cheers, Pete.

[John Rumm]

Maxtor are made by Seagate these days.

(Of the drives I have seen fail, I don't think Maxtor have been any more prominent (proportionately) than other makes for failures).

(having said that the dead drive in the system someone gave me to fix the other day is a maxtor... still the last two drive failures I have had have been seagate)

[John Rumm]

ITYM Maxblast... indeed it will.

[John Rumm]

If you have enough spare drive space you could create yourself a new "slipstreamed" windows CD with SP2 on it. That will save one of the difficulties.

[John Rumm]

Realistically, a gig or so.

[John Rumm]

Partitioning in general is a good plan, since it makes backup strategies simpler, and reduces the impact of some classes of disk error.

For a modern SP2 install of XPP, you probably need to allocate 20G, if you plan to allow the absolute minimum of application stuff to install on C: (and shift My Documents to point at another partition)

Applications will probably fit in a similar sized partition.

How you use the rest will depend on what you do with your system.

DVD authoring / copies will require big slabs of space (I have a 0.5TB stripe set set aside for this on one machine)

If you are into games, then these can also demand great slabs of space. Requirements for other categories of stuff can be more modest.

It is also worth leaving a reasonable lump of space on a drive unpartitioned. That way you can create a new partition at a later data should you find a need for it, or more likely, shift space around using partition magic of similar to cope with changing needs.

[Andy Hall]

This is true. However there are still some types around that predate their acquisition by Seagate and do have reliability issues.

[tony sayer]

In article , George scribeth thus

OK may not now be a problem as I believe Maxtor and Seagate are now much the same. This was mainly on their 40 G drives around 2-3 years old, other ones in the range don't appear to be that affected if at all....

[tony sayer]

See the other posting re disk size on Maxtors in particular the 40 G ones!..

[manatbandq]

If only statistics were taught properly in school. People like Steve and Conor, as well as realising their mistakes here, would also be able to read the Daily Mail without being taken in by the latest superfood fads and food scares.

MBQ

[manatbandq]

Why?

Really?

Well good for you! I'm very happy for you.

MBQ

[Andy Hall]

Anything up to the 120 and 160GB jobs in some versions can have the issue. 250GB and above is post their acquisition by Seagate.

[Daniel James]

I take the point you make, elsethread, about wanting a clean install ... but the least stressful course of action would be to install the new drive as a second hard drive, move your data off the old drive onto the new one to make some space for the system.

If you want to stick to the clean install plan -- which does have the advantage of giving you a clean system, so it's not a bad idea -- then the easiest course is to create your C: partition (of less than 127GB) and install the XP you have on that, then upgrade to SP2 and patch fully, and then create your remaining partition(s) once you have the LBA48-enabled XP code.

The advice others have given about slipstreaming is good, but if you haven't got the free disk space to do that on the old drive you can get by this way.

Don't worry too much about the new drive being a Maxtor. Although most people posting here seem to agree that the failure rates on Maxtor drives are significantly higher than on most other makes those failure rates are still very small. An odd thing about Maxtor is that the published specs state a higher maximum running temperature than most other makes, but there is some evidence to suggest that Maxtors are actually /less/ tolerant of high temperatures than the others (IIRC Dorothy Bradbury posted something here a few months ago about the lubricants used in Maxtor drives leaking at elevated temperatures) ... keep the drive cool and it will last longer (that's good advice for any make).

Yes, Seagate do now own Maxtor, but that fact doesn't magically improve the quality of drives from Maxtor's old factories. The general consensus hereabouts is that Seagate drives (that aren't Maxtors) are the best -- though recent Chinese-made seagates seem to be an exception to this -- and that recent Samsungs are also very good. Hitachi/IBM (HGST) drives, which many avoided for some years after problems with one model of "deathstar" (deskstar) drive, are also coming back into vogue. Most people don't seem to like Western Digital, though they have their fans.

A long as you're not proposing to share the disks with any OS that can't read NTFS then yes, that's the usual advice. If you also want to be able to run (say) Win98 you will need a FAT32 partition for that.

That is what I have always done ... but to be honest there isn't much to be gained by keeping the system and applications separate. If you trash the C drive and have to reinstall the OS you will still need to reinstall the applications because all their configuration/setup information is kept in the registry (which lives -- or lived -- on drive C). I now partition my Windows boxes with system and apps together on drive C and data on drive E (there is no drive D). I stick to E for data for historical reasons (and because it saves me having to think which system I'm using).

Another thing to bear in mind is how you are going to back up your data. At one point I limited data partitions to 5GB (and had several of them) so that each was unlikely to contain more data than could be backed up onto a single (single-layer) DVD. If your data can be broken up that way that's not a bad idea, but if you're going to do video editing or fancy photo manipulations you will have single files bigger than that, and will need bigger partitions to store them.

Yes, that's a pain. Some other applications will install wherever you like but will insist on installing certain "common" components (DLLs, etc) on C so that they can be shared between the apps in the package and shared with other apps from the same vendor.

Note that in Vista there are some reasons to prefer to install applications in C:\Program Files, as Vista's UAC mechanism places greater trust in properly-installed applications in Windows's preferred applications folder than it does in executables found elsewhere on disk (which might be unwelcome visitors). If you plan on ever upgrading to Vista this i something that you might want to consider (but, personally, I wouldn't say that Vista was worth the bother).

XP uses a frighteningly large amount of space, compared with Win2k or NT4. I'd allow 10GB for the OS alone. How much more space you need to leave for apps depends on how many apps you use. I generally leave between 10GB and

20GB, depending on the overall disk size, and I haven't found 10GB to be a problem (e.g. on this 30GB laptop) ... but on a big drive you might leave a little more if you use a lot of apps.

Cheers, Daniel.

[Andy Hall]

35 out of 200 across several batches is small?

Exactly

[Lobster]

Given that my Maxtor is a 250Gb one, then, does that mean you and the rest of the panel would reckon it should be as good as a Seagate, in fact?

I'd decided to return the Maxtor (currently awaiting collection by me at the PO) on the basis that nobody was claiming it was going to be

*better* than the competition, whereas quite a few were claiming the contrary. Do I still need to do so?!

David

[tony sayer]

ISTR changing one 80 G drive at some stage..

[Andy Hall]

After the games I had with the 40-120GB drives of Maxtor, I have never bought anything else from them.

I'm using them in equipment that always goes into temperature controlled, clean environments with clean power supplies. However, the consequential costs of failures are very high since installations are often in obscure places.

Having said that, the 250GB and above drives are of an era some way post the Seagate acquisition. The drives are different technology and one would hope that any manufacturing issues at specific factories have been resolved or the factories closed.

The other aspect to consider is what are you doing for backups? Another drive?