Help with hard drive partitioning!?

Question

This is a review from www.newegg.com.

Cons: Windows XP won't recognize the full drive until SP1 and SP2 are installed. Not WD's fault but I freaked out initially when a new XP installation only saw 137 of 250G

Other Thoughts: Allowed XP Pro to install the 137G partition only and then after SP2 was downloaded (Windows Update) I partioned the remaining 100 + gigs to D drive).

What does it mean to partition, and how do you partition something to a disc drive? I know, d doesn't stand for disc, but aren't all disc drives d:/? Thanks.

Answer 1

To partition a drive is to divide it up into separate drive letters. Usually this is done so you can manage the content of your data into a easier manner. There is no advantage system wise to partition a signal drive.

Another thing is that you can partition your hard drive into several partitions.

For example: you have a 250gb hard drive.

You could have 50gb for applications and your Operating System, 100gb for your media files, and the other 100gb for your data.

The sky is the limit as long as you provide enough hard drive space for your Operating System and applications.

Answer 2

Before a computer is able to use a hard drive there must be a partition table built. The partition table is akin to a table of contents in a book, it tells the computer where on the harddrive itself to find the information needed. Partitioning and formatting create this "table of contents". The format of "d:/" is the way that Windows/DOS displays the drive information to the user. Drives are identified by letters A-Z. Typically drives A&B are reserved for floppy drives, while C-Z are for all other drives (harddrives, CD/DVD drives, Flash drives, etc.). Harddrives may be partitioned into multiple "virtual" drives. Think of it as an encyclopedia set, together it is one complete system, but to manage it more easily, it has been broken down into smaller segments. When done to a HD, the first partition would be for the operating system and the remaining partition(s) could be used for data storage. By segmenting a high capacity harddrive in this manner, you could store your data on a separate partition then your OS and in case you needed to reinstall Windows you could not lose your data.

The designation of D drive and d:/ mean the same thing jsut two different ways to represent them. D drive is easier to say then d colon slash drive. The d:/ designation is a remainder from the days of DOS.

Answer 3

Partitioning is when you split a drive into multiple virtual drives - the computer sees them as separate, though they exist on a single physical drive. The purpose is to keep system files separate, or perhaps run multiple systems on one computer. All drives are not d:\, d is a drive letter, just like a, c, or any other letter can be. If a drive is partitioned, it will have a drive letter for each partition, so if there's two, they will be c: and d:, because hard drive lettering starts at c: (to allow room for up to 2 floppy drives a: and b:)

Also, while you can use programs to partition a drive after it is in use, it isn't generally reccommended, and should really only be done after a new format (wipe clean) unless there's a pressing need to do otherwise.

Answer 4

What your thinking is correct, all disks are drives. However, the terms "logical" and "physical" drive come into play.

A physical drive is what it sounds like, an actual disk drive, complete with disc platters, read/write heads and the like.

A logical drive is what Windows recognizes as an actual storage array. You could take a drive of, say, 100 and break it into 10 logical drives of 10 while you would only have 1 physical drive.

There are reasons for this verbiage and complexity, but that's kind of boring.

As for the first half of your question, Windows does not like it when you repartition (aka, create logical) drives, especially while windows is running. However, there are several utilities, like Partition Magic, that will allow you to repartition an active drive.

WARNING: Messing around with your boot partition can create a real headache if you really need your computer, aka, you can go from a "Dell such and such" to a "Dell No-Work" pretty quickly if you manage to delete your master boot record, something that, oddly enough, Windows allows you to do quite easily.

Hope that helps.

Answer 5

I overcame this problem by doing a dual boot with UBUNTU. Then if I need to re-install XP, I use the Gparted program in UBUNTU to reformat my windows partition.