Re: New year, clean install, any advantage to having applications on D: instead of C:?

This question has already been asked in an earlier thread (Identically
titled, btw) in this NG. Apologies to the OP since I can't directly see
any posts from yahoo.com (I have *.yahoo.com in my KF filter list :-)

I have simply copied and pasted my earlier posting since it nicely
covers this rapidly aging ground. Here it is reproduced between the
'dotted' lines:

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The message <MPG.21e4264fc96c87dd989690@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
from Jon <spam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> contains these words:

Hello all, happy new year, happy hangover etc.

I'm going to clean reinstall today. Any advantage to having a smaller C:
for windows and making a separate D: partition for applications?

Yes! And, you could go even further if you have a 120GB or larger drive.

Assuming it's winXP, create a 10 to 12GB drive C to install the OS to,
a 20 to 30GB drive D for the majority of your apps and the remaining
space as a general purpose data/large apps (usually gigabyte sized
games) and multimedia stuff.

You can make the first two FAT32 if you wish to have a "Get Out Of
Jail" win98 boot floppy recovery option, but, if you're planning on
being able to store media files larger than FAT32's 4GB-1 byte limit, I
suggest you use NTFS for drive D, especially if you have more than 64GB
of space to throw at it.

A point worth keeping in mind is that you can (and should!) move the
"My Documents" folder onto drive D (needs to be done for each user
account when more than one such is inflicted on a _Personal_ Computer).
This is very easy to do, just right click on the desktop icon and edit
the drive letter shown in the path (followed by clicking the apply
button, followed by saying yes to the question of moving the data).

You'll find that defragging drive C will be a matter of minutes rather
than hours. You'll also discover it makes very little improvement since
you've got all those wanderlusty OS files corralled into the fastest 10
or 12 GB of the hard drive instead of being spread right across the disk
in amongst the apps and data files.

Even assuming you stick to the same defragging routine, the total time
to defrag the 3 seperate disk volumes will be significantly less than in
the case of defragging a single huge drive C occuppying the same space.

Ignore any advice that suggests it's ok to lump the more modest sized
apps in with the OS files, you'll lose a lot of the benefit of
corralling the OS files into one tight high performance space on the
drive.

HTH

--
Regards, John.

Please remove the "ohggcyht" before replying.
The address has been munged to reject Spam-bots.
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Regarding concerns by the OP of _this_ version of the "New year, clean
install, any advantage to having applications on D: instead of C:"
thread, over "Partition Confusion", don't be. IME, _all_ partitioning
utilities will identify the partitions by volume label, by order of disk
space usage and also their size and type.

Only a really dumb "Dumb Ass" could confuse the first 8GB primary dos
partiton labeled SATA VOL_01 with the second 20GB logical one labeled
SATA VOL_02 or the third 270GB logical one labeled NTFS VOL_03 (to quote
an actual real life win2k example :-).

Of course, this _can't_ protect against hard disk failure (this
strategy isn't designed to do so), so you should, at the very least,
backup your pricless, unique data (such as holiday photos and that 500
page novel you've spent the last 5 years sweating blood over. :-) to at
least one other backup media or device.

Aside from performance and ease of maintainance issues such a
partitioning strategy endows on a PC, this offers a clear cut way to
rollback to a pre-stuffed install of windows (whether it be due to
malware or just *** programs) using disk partition imaging software.

In my case, the actual PowerQuest Drive Image version 3 restore process
(after booting from a win95osr2 boot floppy to run a copy of the rescue
disk software held on a 20GB FAT32 disk volume on the second hard drive)
takes less time than the following one and a quarter minute reboot into
win2k that takes place afterwards.

Even restoring from a 6 month old image backup is a vast improvement
over the "Install From Scratch" alternative. Obviously, in the early
months of the life of a new PC with a freshly installed OS, you should
be making monthly backups (or even weekly ones within the 'Honeymoon
Period') but once you have left the 'Rapid Churn' phase of
installing/uninstalling apps behind you, you can reduce the frequency of
such backups to the point where you can get away with just 3 or 4 a
year.

HTH & HAHNY :-)

--
Regards, John.

Please remove the "ohggcyht" before replying.
The address has been munged to reject Spam-bots.

.