PC laptop users: do you partition?

dr · Post by dr » Sun Jan 05, 2003 7:17 pm

subject says it all.. do you partition your drives for system/apps/files (or any other method)? is this a good idea?

looking for any recommendation and/or discouragement. thx.

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Sun Jan 05, 2003 8:52 pm

dr wrote:subject says it all.. do you partition your drives for system/apps/files (or any other method)? is this a good idea?

on my desktop, i have three partitions across two disks.

partition one is 1st boot partition and contains windowsXP and apps, and non-music related data. NTFS format.

partition two is 2nd boot partition for music, contains stripped down windowsXP and all music apps. NTFS format.

partition three, actually a whole separate disk, is a win32 formatted disk that contains the music files.

on my laptop, all one partition.

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Mon Jan 06, 2003 2:19 am

interesting, thanks.

can you describe what 'stripped down' means as it pertains to XP?

& anyone out there who has partitioned their laptop drive?

Hexadecimal · Post by **Hexadecimal** » Mon Jan 06, 2003 7:25 am

I partition my laptop drive into two partitions, one for the O/S (Xp or 2000) and application installations, the other for music and data files.

I always Ghost (with Norton Ghost) the main partition every few months to allow for easy restoration of the computer in case something goes wrong or the system becomes irrevocably unstable, though this probably not necessary with Windows XP because of its rollback features.

IMHO, one would have to be nuts not to partition the drive.

Hexadecimal
www.freesidemusic.com

Mbazzy · Post by **Mbazzy** » Mon Jan 06, 2003 8:43 am

'stripped down' in this context -> OS undone of all necessary features like networking, internet explorer, DNS, PWS, powermanagement, fancy graphics, etc and optimized for audio ... for win98se there even is a "special program" for this : http://www.litepc.com/index.html

geargasm · Post by **geargasm** » Mon Jan 06, 2003 11:09 am

After more hard disk failures that I'm comfortable with, I'm RAID-5 these days on my desktop.

As far as laptop partitioning, I don't screw around with that. My current laptops (thinkpads) have a special partition table I don't want to screw up. Same goes with a lot of laptop manufacturers. I'd rather have one partition on it than risk losing my nice hibernation features.

- Mike

chris_borgia · Post by **chris_borgia** » Mon Jan 06, 2003 10:21 pm

I always partition at least 2 sometimes more depending on the size of the drive. Got to stay organized and nothing spells good organization like the first elements in your disk drive hierarchy
(i.e. your drives and partitions come first!)

for you mac users check this link out

http://www.sciencequest.org/support/com ... rives.html

datagroove

chris_borgia · Post by **chris_borgia** » Mon Jan 06, 2003 10:22 pm

I always partition at least 2 sometimes more depending on the size of the drive. Got to stay organized and nothing spells good organization like the first elements in your disk drive hierarchy
(i.e. your drives and partitions come first!)

for you mac users check this link out

http://www.sciencequest.org/support/com ... rives.html

datagroove

datagroove · Post by **datagroove** » Mon Jan 06, 2003 11:20 pm

to add to that, another reason why you would want to partition besides organization needs is for better handling of your documents and files vs your systems OS. In other words have a partition or drive just for your downloads, documents, audio, images (all the things you would want to back up and retain in case of a system failure that amounts to the need for a system restore.) I guess that to falls in the organizational classification.
A Technical reason for partition might be to defrag your drives in segments instead of the whole drive at a time..

datagroove

oddible · Post by **oddible** » Tue Jan 07, 2003 6:29 am

Yeah, having your audio recording freeze your OS because of lack of disk space on the OS partition sucks. 2 partitions recommended. Unless of course you have the luxury of a second drive - which is even better because of performance. OS functions not taking up disk cycles during recording or playback. Laptops don't have that option unless you're going with an external firewire drive or something (which is incredible and a handy way to carry around multiple disks of samples).

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Tue Jan 07, 2003 3:28 pm

Question to those with laptops: As geargasm mentioned, he doesn't partition laptops because of a 'special partition table.' I'm not sure what this means but I certainly would like more information on it. I partition my desktop drives (stripped down XP for music, regular XP for all other apps, another partition for audio files, spread across 2 hd where the audio files & XP music partition are on different drives) and had planned on doing the same when I finally get a laptop.

So - is partitioning laptops definitely a bad idea? I loathe the thought of installing Live with Office and all my graphics apps.

TIA

Arp

Rx · Post by Rx » Tue Jan 07, 2003 3:29 pm

That was me just now...

Neil · Post by **Neil** » Wed Jan 08, 2003 5:44 am

I opted to get a external firewire HD (7200 rpm) so i wouldnt have to partition my hard drive.. and put less strain on my laptop.. so far its been working great, been able to put 30 sample cd's in it with only 15% of the hard drive being used, that leaves me with ALLOT more space for more sample cd's.. also helps me so that i wont have to audition sample cds in order to save space, now i just go thru in live and pick and choose.. tho must throw a word of caution out there, its pretty loud since it always spins when its on and it takes up an extra plug on your socket(most laptops have the tiny version firewire hook up thing with no power output)

Neil

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Wed Jan 08, 2003 6:52 pm

Anonymous wrote:Question to those with laptops: As geargasm mentioned, he doesn't partition laptops because of a 'special partition table.' I'm not sure what this means but I certainly would like more information on it.

ditto - what is the deal here??

geargasm · Post by **geargasm** » Wed Jan 08, 2003 8:20 pm

It depends. Laptops are evil beasts. I'm not sure how this is supported in 2k/Xp, but this is how it worked on an older laptop of mine:

The partition table of the laptop was preset to a 128MB Primary and a 12GB(-128MB) Primary partition. When you'd hibernate the laptop, it would dump your system state (the contents of your RAM) to the 1st Primary partition.

Two major problems happened during the time I owned this.

The one problem I ran into rather early was with a RAM upgrade. The first time it went into hibernate after the upgrade, it got "stuck" and I had to format to fix it.

The other problem occured with an older version of Partition Magic. I think what it ended up doing was changing the type of the 1st partition and that ended up causing the whole PC not to boot.

Generally, I stay away from PC laptops for a few reasons:

1. Proprietary drivers unavailable for anything but default install. I had a Compaq that would only let me install WinME. I prefer doing clean OS installs and this really was a bummer. Also note, if I were to not use the utility to install the OS that comes on the restore CD, I'd have ruined a BIOS and Hibernate partition. With the advent of speed step processors, and other mobile features, it's difficult to track down all the software you need to run properly.

2. Until XP, there were boatloads of problems with USB Audio and Windows. While it's fixed now, I don't know how the hardware I buy will react with my configuration.

3. Non-standard configurations. See reason #1.

4. Locked into an OS. Many times you'll find that you're locked into the OS that your laptop came with. Try and upgrade, and you'll see why

During the 5-6 years I was a Mac and PC technician, I got laptops of all sorts put on my desk. The magic that PC manufacturers use to get some things to work right sometimes aren't the properly engineered way to do things, which can cause problems for people who want to change their configuration down the road.

PC laptop users: do you partition?

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