Why partition a drive

Hi,I deleted the partition on my hard drive,i deleted the D drive and i was left with the drive labelled C. So far so good!! I thought if i deleted the D drive,the capacity i was deleteing would be transferred to the C drive,so doubling the C drive. Why has this happened,i have restarted the Samsung NC10 but still no gain in the C drive.

Thanks Alan. Is a partition useful against virus attack? I think to duplicate data in D and E disk-partition so if one is attacked, I have the back-up here in the same hard drive.

Is it OK? Hi Leo — good article. In context of size of hard drives these days, is this a reason not to partition? In fact, it would tend to decrease usable space. If one drive fills up to almost full, some of the free space in the drive might become unusable. I find partitioning very useful in organising major types of data such as: documents, software, movies, recovery, projects. Its also very useful because when the system goes down, only c: drive is affected none of the data.

I also have a second internal hard drive for backup of the first drive. External hard drives are useless, two of them went down with mechanical failure. Hi Leo, Thanks for nice explanation. My new laptop is configured with a single partition having window7 installed in it. What you suggest? Rgds, Bhupender. Hi Leo, Thanks for your prompt reply.

My system is also having a one key recovery feature, changing the partition size will also make the recovery feature useless, as it will not work. So I will go with you and not planning to go for hardisk partitioning any more. Also i have already purchased a good licensed antivirus software to make the system secure.

Just one more query, I have heard about system restore application of windows, i just wanted to know how effective it is in case of some malware attack. Although i can any time revert to the factory setting using one key recovery feature, but this will make me loose many of the installed applications. Best Regards, Bhupender. Bhupender System restore can do very little in helping to recover from a virus.

You might find these articles useful Can I get rid of spyware using system restore? Hi, i download a lot of movies and regularly change what games im playing, which means im constantly moving watched movies to a portable hard-drive and sometimes back again to watch. On an average month i would transfer gig of data between my main drive and my portable drives.

Is this data transfer high enough that i would be better off partitioning my hard drive into system plus main programs and data files? Since installing Win 8, the backup image would be quickly outdated due to updated versions of software i regularly use. Although i still have a small encrypted partition and a large one for big, rarely accessed PDF files.

I have opted for partitioning in order to be able to install the main OS on the C drive but then install all other programs on the D drive the partition. That way if I ever need to format the C drive alone as part of some sort of maintenance I will not have to lose precious time reinstalling all the programs.

However I have never come to this point until now…and although I am about to reinstall my precious C drive with the main OS as it has slowed considerably, I have no clue whatsoever how to recall he programs installed on the D drive. Can you help me with this, please? Dan Installing your programs on the D: drive is an interesting idea, but unfortunately, if you reinstall the OS, the installed programs will no longer work.

When a program is installed, it makes changes to the registry and usually installs files in various places on the c: drive. So when you reinstall Windows, the programs will look for these files, and not finding them will cause the program to error out. I have always had OS et al on C: and data on D: mainly for backup but it also faciltates uncomplicated copying of a whole partition over to a new computer, and allows me to reinstall OS image without worrying about the data.

In addition, I use substitute drives using the subst DOS command. I heave a sigh of relief each time subst still works when I upgrade to a new OS, particularly to Win8.

I have a new HP Laptop with Windows 8. C is for everything, but recovery, which is handled by D, In the past I have partitioned my HD into several partitions for data, photos, etc. As to backing up my data, I stumbled upon a unique way of handling it.

You plug it into your computer and forget about it. The first time you use it you check off what you want backed up- data, pictures, etc. The first backup takes a little time that depends on the amount of data you have on your computer, but from that point on whenever you turn on your computer the USB drive scans your internal drive and just adds any new data, photos, etc.

I find it to be the perfect solution to backing up your data, the USB Drive, as long as you leave it plugged in you can take it out after it does its back-up at start-up, but I have enough USB slots to leave it in automatically backs up your data without you having to remember to do anything.

If you have a crash, loss of data. It is most annoying to fill your data partition and find you have lots of spare space on your OS partition! Each to his own, I guess. I used to set up multiple partitions in the old days, but there is little value for it now, with NTFS. I find that speeds things up a lot. It also allows you to keep an image of your OS and Programs separately from your data, which can come in handy.

Other than that, if I am just using one drive, I just make sure that I keep all my data in the My Documents folder, and keep it classified in sub folders. Does the same thing that partitions used to do. And its easy to just back up your documents folder.

I frequently backup by making an image file of drive C:, and keeping the page file off that partition saves a bunch of room in the image file the page file is 4 GB—why clutter up the image with that meaningless data?

The computers are fast enough that there is little or no speed advantage. I find that when that happens it is a time consuming pain-in-the-butt to reinstall all of the programs and all of the updates to a new hard-drive. Years ago, I would do that but, now I mirror the entire hard-drive which I update fairly regularly.

Having a mirror allows me to swap the drives in 15 minutes or less, and the computer is back to where it was before the crash.

An alternative to having a dedicated mirror drive is to have a good image backup. Same result, just takes a little bit more time to restore the image after the failed drive has been replaced. The only real reason to use partitions is for the multi-boot capability. You can also use drive spanning to increase your space without having to migrate.

I started using this procedure when working on servers with raid arrays especially those that grew over time and it has worked fine for me in that environment and on home desktops. I have always kept my OS and programs on C: drive and my personal data on one or more partitions, so that when I do a clean install or re-image my C: drive, all my data is left intact.

And I move my Favorites to my data partition for the same reason. I bought a HP Pavilion Envy dektop. It came with a 2TB hard drive with a restore partition. Put the 2TB drive in storage just in case. I put a small GB hard drive as the second drive for daily use called drive E. Installed a eSata card with port multiplication.

The 4 bay enclosure can easily be swapped between my Windows 7 and 8. Have tons of storage space and versitility to boot. The hard drives and enclosures are very cheap as well. That is the easy way to go. I agree with you, Leo. In the old dsya, I used to partition, it wa pretty much necessary because of the cost of drives. The cradle accepts both 3. My laptops and PC have only one drive, C:, with some data for convenience, but i mostly use the NAS for data of music, all personal files, photos, movies,etc.

But I backup, backup, and backup. Thom Souza. Hi, I have a question regarding partitioning. Is it true that when you partition some of the files from C: would be transferred to D:? I hope I get a response soon. We have no IT person on site. We have 6 partitions and C drive. We are full in all drives. We have been told to delete or save our My Documents folder each. Should I back up create folders or copy all drives into an external hard drive for each person to work from as an immediate solution?

I personally recommend not partitioning. It reduces the efficiency of your storage as when a partition gets close to full, the leftover space become difficult to efficiently use.

Folders are dynamic and expand and shrink as needed. That was a great article, very informative. I do not partition my hard drive. On Windows, I believe your user folder cannot be moved to another partition anyway. So even if you keep your documents on a separate partition, your user profile is still on the system partition, physically separating what should belong together. I deleted one of my partition on my external hard drive is it possible for me not to lose data on other partition which is local disc D?

You can never again lose any valuable data by backing up regularly. Leo has the best instructions on how to do that! If the OS is on the smaller G partition instead of being spread around the entire 1TB drive, will this not improve boot time speed? The first thing to do is to open up Windows Explorer and see if you can find the drive listed next to the C drive.

When an external drive is plugged in the computer usually assigns a letter to it automatically. And also make sure that you know that just having your data on an external drive does not mean it is backed up.

If it is only in one place it is not backed up. So , can you help me for getting back my memory back.. I spoke with a Security Camera system installer who gave me conflicting information and I would like to his info confirm with you. I have been under the impression that there really is no benefit about splitting one physical drive into multiple logical drives, unless the users want to dual boot or organize files separately.

I did not understand why and when I asked him he stated that he enabled virtual memory on each drive to speed up performance and that camera systems operate better with the multiple drives. He did not go into detail was very vague. Is he somewhat correct? There are pros and cons to partitioning. This all would have been avoided if it were all on one logical drive. I use Acronis for disk imaging but Macrium Reflect free is a suitable alternative. In the same way, disk partitioning compartmentalizes your system so that each region can run and be utilized independently, without affecting one another.

For instance, if you have files on different partitions and one becomes corrupted, the files on the other partition s should go unharmed. Similarly, if you run different operating systems OS on separate partitions and one becomes damaged, you could boot your computer from the other this is commonly done with Windows and Linux. This allows you to minimize the impact of data corruption, viruses, and crashes. If done incorrectly, partitioning can unintentionally reduce total storage space.

Multiple partitions require the system to duplicate certain file administration areas, and having the same duplicate files on different partitions will also take up more space than normal. Duplicated files on the same partition just require the system to update the metadata, but on separate partitions you will need to copy the entirety of the file, essentially doubling the space used.

Depending on how you allocate space among each partition, you might also prevent yourself from using your whole disk capacity. Partitioning your hard drive essentially tells your computer to treat portions of that drive as separate entities. You can also set up an emergency partition. Some computer manufacturers Lenovo, for example supply a built-in emergency partition on some of their PCs, but you can make your own, if your PC lacks one.

Finally, partitioning lets you try out other operating systems—like Linux, for example. First, back up your data. An entry for Disk Management should show up underneath the Storage heading on the left-hand side.