Single drive questions

[Xtreme Barton]

ok i noticed that some of these compaq and hp systems run a single drive.. but the thing is they split some how into partitions im guessing ... i have one drive and when in windows it says i have two.. one is d: save im gueesing for os only and the other is c: drive.. is ther any advantage to splitting these rather than having just installed windows completely on drive c: .. what benifits and downfalls ??

[Xtreme Barton]

COME ON help me out ??

[David]

If you only have one physical drive then I dont see much advantage in the way of speed. However there are other advantages.

Its easier to keep stuff organised. ie C for Windows, D for documents and E for programs. Also if you need to reinstall windows you need only reformat C, and thus you dont need to back up all your documents and stuff.

In my PC I have progs and windows on C, and all my Docs on D. C is a 40G Seagate ATA100 drive and D is a Samsung 120GB SATA drive.

[Como]

a-lot of earyler compaqs did this with rather small second partitions...tehy said it was for "backup" reasoning, but i foud that they are actually used to keep people from using the recovery disks on any other model. they made those partitions a ceartain size with specialty software, and put hidden stuff in it, (or between them) , and the recovery disk wont work unless its there.

Newer ones do the same thing, with a hidden partition.

[Redstone]

If you only have one hard drive, you can make a small seperate partition for your page files. It is said that can increase performance. Next time you reformat divide up the hard drive and experiment.