Skeen said:
Is there any advantage to breaking up your HD into a bunch of partitions? Why not just have one big one?
Yes. It's called divide and conquer. Machiavelli is still revelent!
It's not at all unknown for Windows (all versions) to slowly degrade if you are installing and removing software and hardware. If it's all in one file system when you do that, you either have to not wipe it (which is the best way to do it), or you lose all those useful at installation time files - up-to-date drivers and so on - or you have to remember to put them all on CD.
If, OTOH, you have two or more partitions and only install Windows and what insists on being in C: in the C: partition, there are all your downloads waiting in D: and/or E: for you to install them.
Also, if you reinstall some software on top of where a previous copy was, it will pick up all the settings automatically. Some of it asks you if you want to keep them, some just does.
Finally, if you are searching for specific file, you can reduce the search time by searching the right drive.
HOWEVER with Win2K / WinXP you have to remember to alter the default setting for 'My Documents' from C:\Documents and Settings \%USER%\My Documents to E:\My Documents (or whatever). Personally I'd like to be able to tell Windows to use E: (or whatever) instead of C for this folder, as it also contains things like your IE favourites (if you use IE), your OE data (if you use it), the icons on your desktop, and a few other useful things it would be useful to have preserved in the event of a reinstall.
Someone else in the thread was also hinting at a new maximum partition size limit somewhere in Windows (48-bit LBA) - this would be yet another reason to sub-divide.
My background is Unix and we've been dividing & conquering there for years...
My own PC has C: (8GB, Windows 2K), D: (8GB, other programs) and E: (the rest of the drive, documents, photos, web site development area, CSV when I get and 'aroundtoit' and it will also have the flight simlulator when I get around to reinstalling that, as it's data files are *massive*.
However a lot of PCs (not always just the cheaper ones) these days come with a strange version of Windows which is a restore CD, not an installation CD, so the only way to get multiple partitions with one of those is with something like Partition Magic, and if you have to restore it all gets replaced with one huge C: again.