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Finally made it to Windows 7 -- looking for partitioning reccomendations

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MerleOne:
I've never understood why people go crazy with disk partitions. Some people seem to use them like one would use folders. There's no good reason I can think of to have a "movies" partition, a "music" partition, etc. 2 partitions, as 40hz said, boot and data, or at most 3, with boot, data, recovery/images. Of course keeping recovery/images on the same physical drive limits its applicability in the case of disaster. *Some* system problems can be recoverable that way (i.e. something that doesn't involve physical issues with the whole drive), but it's really better to keep sys images and recovery partitions on a separate drive IMO.
- Oshyan
-JavaJones (October 20, 2011, 01:34 PM)
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There is one situation where an extra partition is useful, IMHO : game installation.  For instance, my Steam folder is currently 35 GB big.  I have a dedicated partition for that.  If I had installed the steam folder on my system disk, it would have made images much too big, for files I can re-download anytime.

nosh:
+1 for what 40 said:
I wouldn't go too overboard with partitioning. Segregating the drive into one partition for the operating system and programs; and a second partition for user data should be sufficient for general use. Basically this divides the drive between what needs to be reloaded from CD and everything else that will get lost if it isn't backed up.
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with the added qualification mentioned by MerleOne:
There is one situation where an extra partition is useful, IMHO : game installation.
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...basically anything that's so large that imaging it with the OS isn't worthwhile. Mostly games, but also includes CD/DVD dumps or virtual drives.

brotman:
Thanks, y'all, for the tips and opinions.  I'll look them all over and see how to best apply it to my system.

Quick question, for Carol Haynes: is having a seperate boot partition something you do manually or is it just part of a normal install???

Thanks again! now off to ponder and then to sleep

MilesAhead:
I have had set ups in the past with many partitions.  Mainly because I was big into multi-booting.  But another consideration was easy repair of the OS. Now though, with free imaging backup programs, and no real need to hide one OS from the other, I tend to go with a partition per OS. Unless we're talking Linux in which case I add at least one swap partition.

Now I tend to keep most of my data on external drives.  Also as the drives that came stock with the machine got larger, I found myself operating with more and more free space on the system partition.  It works well for me.  For example I'm on Windows Seven 32 bit now with 90% free space on the system partition.  I use "light" defrag programs to maintain the partition.  Defrag tends to take 1/2 hour or less depending on how many options I enable.  For that reason I defrag at least a couple of times a week.

If I had bucks for an SSD drive I might consider another approach.  But for conventional HD based OS I don't see the need on a user PC.

It's largely a matter of personal preference.  But I do remember frequently resorting to Partition Magic back in the days I was multi-booting.  The Windows system partition has a tendency to creep up in size more than you expect.

Even with installing most apps on another partition there's always a spoil sport that wants to put shared files,libraries, and other junk on the OS partition.

Plus these days with fast docking stations you can get internal drive speeds using external disks. It doesn't take forever to move your data over.

Carol Haynes:
Quick question, for Carol Haynes: is having a seperate boot partition something you do manually or is it just part of a normal install???
-brotman (October 20, 2011, 11:53 PM)
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If you install windows 7 on an empty drive the installer will create the main partitions you specify but also a 100Mb boot partition. It is part of Windows attempt to separate the boot information from the OS. It also includes some system repair tools for use in an emergency (used via the usual F8 menu).

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