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Those who use a seperate partition for programs/games...

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gingo

Member
Joined
Oct 23, 2002
I'm debating wether or not I should use a seperate partition for my programs and games, and have Win XP on its own smaller partition.

The main benefit seems to be that if you ever had to reformat or reinstall windows your programs and games would still be there. But would they still work properly? What about the registry keys and whatnot that they change/add?

Can someone confirm that this method works?
 
It doesn't. :)

The only benefit is really if you have to reformat, your save games might still be there (something you might otherwise forget to move into a safe location before a reformat)... Without the registry keys, or with restoring the registry, things are bound to go haywire as many things also depend on files stored on the OS partition. It would be a sloppy solution at best.

Also, if you have a seperate program/game partition, it will mean that the R/W heads will have more distance to travel in order to switch between OS and programs/games, which will result in decreased performance.

What I use, is a seperate partition, on a secondary drive. Here I store an image of a fresh OS install, with all drivers, and base programs I never update - MS Office, Openoffice.org, Convert, and MS powertoys. Also, I store copies of all install CD's here, and all install files for anything else I have downloaded or anything I regularly install but get new versions often (Firefox mainly, few others).

This way, I drop the fresh image (Ghost) on my system partition and have windows w/ SP2 plus more in under/around 10 minutes... Then it takes only a couple more minutes to run the installs of whatever else I want to put on, and there is no waiting to install things from any archaic CD's. :D
 
...out of curiousity, couldn't you backup your registry to a floppy, format, import the backup of the registry after installing Windoze, and have the games/programs working again? Yeah, I know, sounds too easy for Windoze, but it would be nice if you could just merge the old values into the fresh install, and have everything work like it did before...

...sorry, just day-dreaming, I'll shut up now, nothing is that easy, heh heh heh... :D
 
I.M.O.G- Thats a really good idea. Right now I have my music, movies, and documents on a seperate partition. Also on the second partition I have the setup files to my downloaded programs (Openoffice, Firefox, benches, etc.) so when I reformat, I load windows, the drivers, SP2 (on cd), then install from my backup. I think I may try your method, however.
 
Brundle Fly said:
...out of curiousity, couldn't you backup your registry to a floppy, format, import the backup of the registry after installing Windoze, and have the games/programs working again? Yeah, I know, sounds too easy for Windoze, but it would be nice if you could just merge the old values into the fresh install, and have everything work like it did before...

...sorry, just day-dreaming, I'll shut up now, nothing is that easy, heh heh heh... :D

I mentioned this in my post, but also noted that it was a sloppy solution at best... There are a lot of registered files associated to files on the program/game partition which reside on the system partition. Registry backups weren't meant to be used like this, and it would be lucky to work out well... After all, a large portion of the reason for reformatting is to clean out the registry.

You could configure everything, then create an image of the system partition which you can restore every so often, roughly accomplishing the same thing, but this would mean there is no reason to have your program and game files seperate from the system partition as they could just be preserved in the image.
 
jbloudg20 said:
I.M.O.G- Thats a really good idea. Right now I have my music, movies, and documents on a seperate partition. Also on the second partition I have the setup files to my downloaded programs (Openoffice, Firefox, benches, etc.) so when I reformat, I load windows, the drivers, SP2 (on cd), then install from my backup. I think I may try your method, however.

I was trying to keep things simple in my last post, but I actually also keep my documents, music, and videos on the secondary partition... makes not accidentally nukeing important stuff a lot more thoughtless. :)

Creating a base image really makes things quicker though... Then installing drivers and setup files from Hard disk helps a lot too.

One drawback... I wouldn't ever troubleshoot my own machine, its too easy to just drop a new image and be brand new in under 20 minutes.
 
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