how to set up hard drive with partitions in vista? =(

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skyra

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I'm trying to set up my 250gb western digital drive on vista but can't figure out how..

I want to have one 20gb partition for the os itself, than 100gb for programs and 100gb for music, video, documents.

I can't seem to install anything on any other partition other than the 20gb one =\
 
Start - type diskmgmt.msc (press Enter) and then go from there. Disk Management is where all disk partitioning is done in Vista (in Windows, generally).

Be very careful when it comes to partitioning the remaining space on the drive, but it's fairly simple: just follow the steps as required.
 
It may be too late for this, but 20 GB for the OS is going to cause you a lot of grief down the road with Vista. That's what too small. You also are only complicating matters by spreading out your programs.

I'd start over, and create a 100 GB partition for the OS/apps/games, and then format the rest for storage.
 
I gave Vista 30gb and am regretting it, I think 40gb would have been safe. I needed to compress it to keep the free space around 10gb. (For instance, Vista RC1 SP1 needed 10gb free before it'd install itself)

For backup purposes, you want to keep your OS drive as small as possible, when I backup mine it's only about 16gb in size compressed. It has all my main apps in the backup - games. The games being kept on a second drive help me load them quicker despite not being on a raid anymore.

My games are on another drive altogether.
 
>.< how do you start over, do i have to reinstall from the disc again? =\
 
You could. However, if no data exists on your other partitions, you can use PartedMagic to resize your existing 20 GB partition to something larger. Then, boot back into Vista and set up your second partition.
 
DeaconFrost said:
You could. However, if no data exists on your other partitions, you can use PartedMagic to resize your existing 20 GB partition to something larger. Then, boot back into Vista and set up your second partition.
Click to expand...

Be careful using third party apps with Vista's partitions.... I re-sized my Vista partition using GParted and was left with an install that refused to boot. You can fix it with an XP cd, but it's an un-necessary hassle really.....just "extend" the volume in disk management....
 
digital_exhaust said:
Be careful using third party apps with Vista's partitions.... I re-sized my Vista partition using GParted and was left with an install that refused to boot. You can fix it with an XP cd, but it's an un-necessary hassle really.....just "extend" the volume in disk management....
Click to expand...

Wow, I didn't realize Vista's Disk Management could resize partitions. Still on XP here...
 
Vista's Disk Management tool now has extremely limited options for resizing partitions, and only non-system ones. PartedMagic is a "new" tool on the block, basically a much better and more up-to-date edition of GParted which has been around for some time now. It's 'safe' in the sense that it's Vista-ready - Vista tends to be really picky about stuff toying around with the partitions/partition table information, but PartedMagic works fine.
 
bbz_Ghost said:
Vista's Disk Management tool now has extremely limited options for resizing partitions, and only non-system ones. PartedMagic is a "new" tool on the block, basically a much better and more up-to-date edition of GParted which has been around for some time now. It's 'safe' in the sense that it's Vista-ready - Vista tends to be really picky about stuff toying around with the partitions/partition table information, but PartedMagic works fine.
Click to expand...

What do you mean by "non-system ones." I had no problem shrinking my Vista partition from 76 to 52 GB to free up some space for another OS.
 
You can shrink the system partition, sure - but you can't expand it, hence my comment. Once you shrink it, you can't do anything else with that partition - except maybe shrink it again even smaller - using Disk Management; you'd have to turn to PartedMagic or some other tool to expand it.

My apologies for not making that specific situation clearer.
 
bbz_Ghost said:
You can shrink the system partition, sure - but you can't expand it, hence my comment. Once you shrink it, you can't do anything else with that partition - except maybe shrink it again even smaller - using Disk Management; you'd have to turn to PartedMagic or some other tool to expand it.

My apologies for not making that specific situation clearer.
Click to expand...

Wow, didn't know that. that kinda sucks then. Why is it that you can shrink the system/boot partition, but not extend it. That makes no sense.
 
bbz_Ghost said:
You can shrink the system partition, sure - but you can't expand it, hence my comment. Once you shrink it, you can't do anything else with that partition - except maybe shrink it again even smaller - using Disk Management; you'd have to turn to PartedMagic or some other tool to expand it.
Click to expand...

As long as there are free space directly after the partition, you can extend it without worries.

Diskpart in xp can do the same, but only for data-only partitions
 
no, not with diskpart.

but the disk manager in vista can do it, both ways for system partitions
 
pallesen said:
do you have a partition after the one you're trying to extend?
Click to expand...

no. Just free space. The 15gb was for another OS I was trying out, but it's been long since deleted.


Edit: nevermind, the following dialog was kinda misleading. It read like it was creating a new 15GB partition, so I just cancelled out as that's not what I wanted. Tried a again and clicked finish and it did extend the system drive to 76GB.
 
40 gigs for OS alone = serious bloat there. Aside from that it's a good idea to separate your OS and apps from eachothers. That way you can reformat and reinstall the OS without a particulate worry about saving your savegames, settings etc. within your apps. Well, unless the gamemaker was lame and directed savegames to user profiles which is the utmost way to make sure they'll be rendered useless in the sign of first trouble.

Even though you shouldn't need to reinstall Vista too often (and not only because you'll mostly want to uninstall it anyway) it's a good idea to isolate the OS. Usually when trouble hits you, it hits at the worst time and nothing's easyer than to make fatal mistakes in a rush. That is, corrupting the whole OS trying to fix it and ending up formatting *poof* all app data gone before you remember it. I feel extremely vulnerable whenever I have to work with a computer that has only one partition. That never happens if I can set up the box myself.

Of course the option is to remove the HD and use another machine to transfer files and settings but if you're on a single computer household or use a laptop, things get more hairy. Especially if you needed it working yesterday.
 
bbz_Ghost said:
PartedMagic is a "new" tool on the block, basically a much better and more up-to-date edition of GParted which has been around for some time now. It's 'safe' in the sense that it's Vista-ready
Click to expand...

That's good to know... I've been playing around with PartedMagic, and it's nice. I screwed up my Vista install before PM was around, and I assumed that PM would do the same.

Thanks for the heads up.
 
So during setup of the install, it doesn't let you partition the drive?

XP does, though XP does not let you mess with cluster size, etc.

Can I use XP to partition the disk in advance, select non-4K clustersize and then install Vista?
 
xX_Jack_Carver_Xx said:
So during setup of the install, it doesn't let you partition the drive?

XP does, though XP does not let you mess with cluster size, etc.

Can I use XP to partition the disk in advance, select non-4K clustersize and then install Vista?
Click to expand...


Vista does let you partition the drives during setup. Don't know whether it'll let you adjust the clustersize though since it's been since last March that I installed Vista.
 
Messing around with cluster sizes is pointless and would only have an effect - a noticeable effect that can be seen without the need for a specific benchmark that tests for the performance differences - with very particular situations and setups.

NTFS has a default cluster size of 4096 bytes, aka 4KB, and that is fine and dandy for all practical intents and purposes. A larger cluster size can be beneficial with very large files (like video footage that is multigigabyte and single files on a digital video workstation) but in day to day usage of a computer, the 4KB standard size is fine and dandy.

Don't mess around so much with stuff best left alone. The standard has been 4KB for a long long time now with good reasons: it's the best tradeoff considering there are still tons of sub-4K files that would just increase file system slack otherwise. Hard drives store data in 512 byte sectors, so the file system amount is just a logical thing anyway.
 
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