      
|
Installing and Configuring Your
New Hard Drive (Pt.
2)
In this
article regarding the installation and configuration of your new hard drive,
I'll talk a bit about drive partitioning strategy as well as begin an
explanation as to how to transfer the data from your old drive to the new one.
I'll also tell you how to create a Windows boot disk.
In the
last article, I
advised you to follow the instructions that came with your new drive with
regard to partitioning and formatting it. To answer a few additional questions
and present some partitioning strategy, consider the following. If you
purchased, for example, a 10 GB drive, you may wish to consider partitioning it
into several parts, kind of like you would cut a pie. So instead of having just
one giant 10GB partition, your 'C drive', you would have a C, D and E drive if
you partitioned your new drive into three parts, a strategy I use myself. I
usually set the drive up with three partitions. On the C partition is where I
put the Windows operating system as well as many of the programs I use. On the
D partition is where I store the data, graphic and other files I create.
On the E partition is where I load the Windows setup files (I transfer
them from the Win98 folder on the CD-ROM to a folder on my E partition called
Win98.), as well as other setup files which I have usually downloaded from the
Internet. This must be done at the DOS level since you haven't installed
Windows on the new drive yet, so you may not want to attempt this unless you
are familiar with DOS. (Of course, if you will be simply cloning or mirroring
your old drive to your new one, you won't need to reinstall windows.) The
reason I do this is that the Windows installation goes faster and should I ever
need the Windows CD in the future (which is often required), I simply point my
computer to that folder on the E partition (saves me from searching for the CD
which usually isn't handy).
If you want some help on creating
directories (folders) and transferring data in DOS, email me at
richp@poremba.com and I'll walk you through it. It's really quite easy once you
know how.
As for setting the size of the partitions, it depends quite
a bit on what size files you will be creating. As a rule of thumb for the
average user, allocate 60% for the first (C partition), 35% for the second (D
partition) and 5% for the third (E partition). If you will be creating big data
files that have graphics and video, you'll want to make your D partition larger
and your C partition smaller. If you are really clever, you'll get one of the
'on-the-fly' partitioning products, such as
Partition
Magic by Powerquest. Using this handy utility, you'll easily be able to
resize your disk partitions from within Windows anytime you wish. So if you
find yourself running low on space on the D partition, you can make it larger
by stealing some unused space from the C partition. Very cool stuff.
There are additional advantages to multi-partitioned drives as well. One of the
best is that should one ever have a problem, you can usually still get to the
others. Another is that you can use one of the partitions for backing up
important data and graphic files that you have created; stuff you really,
really want or need; another strategy I use. I just spent 10 hours on a
project. I need security, so I save the same data on two different partitions
(or if you will be using your old drive for backup purposes, put a copy of the
data there).
...Rich
Poremba
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