Too late to partition ?

[mike13]

I have a 40 gig hard drive in my computer that is running XP Pro. When I got the computer I only made one partition the size of the hard drive. Now I would like to partition a section of that hard drive to store a backup of MY DOCUMENTS etc. I have been reading about partitioning , but it seems like you need to do that at the beginning when you are first setting up your computer. Is there a way to make a 10 gig partition now, or is it too late ?

[rik]

The only way to partition at this stage would be to use a 3rd party partitioning utility like Partition Magic or the likes...I've personally not used one before so can't recommend one. IMO another hard drive would be your best option.

[1badger11]

I believe it is an open source project which has become quite polished.

oops forgot the link http://www.ranish.com/part/

[lemoncoke]

Partition Magic can do the task of it.
But need newer version that support for Windows XP.
I remember that PM8 or later is work @WinXP.

Hope that it can solve your problem.
:)

[FastGame]

IMHO before you go buy partition software that you'll hardly ever use, buy another HD and use that as the second partition. Get a big one and move all your backups, pic's, music over :) even put your swap file on the second HD.

I see deals all the time for HD's for around $49.00

[Conan]

IMHO before you go buy partition software that you'll hardly ever use, buy another HD and use that as the second partition. Get a big one and move all your backups, pic's, music over :) even put your swap file on the second HD.

I see deals all the time for HD's for around $49.00

I agree. 40 gig is pretty small these days, a 2nd hard drive would be ideal.

[rik]

I saw a deal yesterday on Outpost.com (Fry's). A Seagate 200 gb drive for 70 bucks after rebate...Look here for details:

http://www.techzonez.com/forums/showthread.php?t=8822&page=2

[mike13]

Thanks everyone---It seems like a second HD is the way to go.

[Dehcbad25]

I was going to suggest, but I see everyone answered already. Backup in a partition won't offer you much advantage, unless you want to limit the size of the backup. Also, it will create a lot of disk work, since the disk you are reading to the one you are backing up to are the same. Thought you have 2 partitios, it is still one drive. With this task you will have a slow backup, and it will also considerably raise your temperature. Then you might kill your drive :p
I personally don't recomend partitioning since you actually split the HD, and in real life, if you partition 40 GB in half, it doesn't mean you still have 40 GB. Because you have to leave empty space for the computer to run smoothly, so before you know it you have 2 partitions that have less than 10% and you can defragment. I Strongly recomend another drive instead of partition the one you have. IF you are up to, buy a bigger, newer, faster drive, transfer all data (probably the drive includes the tool, if not you can download from the manufaturer's web site) and leave the 40GB for the backup ;)
There is only one reason that I recomend partitioning. If you are going to have absolutely only one drive, like for example in bussiness. Why? C drive is usually the one that gets corrupted and you can't see thru Windows (because the beggining of the drive is more likely to go bad). This happened in my office at least 5 times (We have 100 PCs) So, it is easy enought for me to plug the HD in another computer, pull the files from the D drive (where all users save their files) and then with time I can run recovery software to pull other files from the C if needed, but in the mean time, the user got all important files related to work ;)

[joshsiao]

Well, I agree that backing up on another partition on the same hard drive won't make much difference.

The best is to back-up on DVD-RWs! I love my new writer becasue I can back up all my files easily rather than on many CD-RWs.

Well, ya 40GB HDDs are the norm now. But I can tell you it is very expensive to get a 80GB HDD from 40GB but it is only a few dollars more from 80GB to 120GB.

[zipp51]

Well for about 2 yrs I have had an 80gb HD partitioned into 3 parts and just recently I had corruption problems that left me with a slooow everything and many window programs that wouldn't start at all including Restore.Reformatted and now have 1 partition.I'm not sure if I will use PM8 again to split the drive up in 3's.My concern is leaving such a large capacity drive whole and having to wait hours for a defrag.Maybe a 3rd party defrag program might speed things up.

[Dehcbad25]

humm Zipp, actually you are contradicting with the defrag. Having smaller partitions might take less time per partition (less size) but it actually takes more in the whole. It is a lot slower to defrag a 60 GB drive than 3 20 GB partition. And the difference is a lot bigger when you have more files on the drive. If partition A for example has only 5% available it is not recomended to defrag, but you might have plenty of space in the other partitions