New to Windows XP. Why all of the partitions?

[roonsbane]

Hello to all,

I am building my new Windows XP dedicated Nuendo Laptop. I have my P4 for everything else but Audio. I am doing a fresh install of Windows onto my intel DuoCore HP. I have noticed that there are three Partitions setup on the computer plus a very small portion of unpartitioned space. Are these partitions neccessary? Aren't they in fact slowing down the hard drive. Even though I always write audio files onto a dedicated 7200RPM Firewire Drive, I spent the extra money for the 7200 RPM internal drive only to have it slower than it could be due to these partitions. Can I get rid of the HP-Recovery C partition and use Norton Ghost to backup the system onto another drive? Musicxp.net recomends turning off that recovery feature anyway for audio recording. What is the unpartitioned space, and can I get rid of that as well?

Thanks for the info in advance.

Cameron

[theblue1]

There's usually (always?) a small amount of any HD that can't be partitioned. Not sure why.

It's my sense that your partitions are not slowing your drive, overall, significantly. It's my off the top of my head thinking that the partitions may actually speed some activities, since seeks on a given partition need cover a smaller area.

But, honestly, I don't have the hard facts. And I don't know if the answers are the same for the older FAT32 (which you most likely do not have) or the current NTFS disk format.

So, what good am I?

Think of me as just something going bump in the night. (Or afternoon, as the case may be.)


WIth regard to HP wizards, helpers, utilities, offerware, etc. If it loads in your boot profile -- I'd get rid of it, by and large. MOST of the stuff that comes installed in the boot profile of new big vendor machines is completely superfluous or does not need to be running in background. (For instance, when you first booted your machine, it probably had "helper" or "loader" apps for all kinds of stuff that you might want to keep -- but which absolutely does NOT need to have helper apps running in background. (I'm thinking things like MusicMatch Jukebox, RealPlayer, WMP, etc.)

I recently bought a refurbished 'beater box' (econo-box) from Dell (a P4 2.8HT, actually not at all a bad machine, runs pretty quiet).

When I first booted it, it had 67 processes running.

But I was able to go into MSConfig and remove 48 of them. That reduced my initial RAM footprint from over 190 MB to under 120 -- and made the machine feel noticeably faster.

[travtele615]

Given that you said it was an HP machine, One partition probably has a ghost image of the entire system to return it back to the state it was in on the day you bought it.

I personally like having a couple of partitions on a windows system. I can keep all my personal stuff including any templates, library items fx settings on that partition. When the OS goes south. i can format reinstall and not worry about my personal data at all.

I don't know if there are any speed losses with partioning but IMHO they haven't out-weighed the benefits I see stated above.

HTH
Travis

[nukmusic]

How big it the ghost Partition? If it small it wont help things. Also be sure to tweak XP's settings. A lot of times when folks buy pc's with preinstalled software...there may be a lot of unnecessary junk running in the back ground. Sometimes 30-40 processes.

After tweaking my setup. I only have 14 processes running . makes a big difference and frees up CPU and Ram power.

[mwd]

The 8mb partition is by XP design. When you install from CD it needs this space to allow for the possibility of converting a drive to Dynamic storage from Basic storage. Don't even mess it.

The best thing (in this order) would be to buy a retail version of XP. You would not believe how much garbage (sign up for netscape, sign up for aol) that it gets rid of. But if you don't want to spend the bucks...

Call HP. Tell them you have to replace your hard drive and you would like a copy of your restore CD's. In about 3 days you will have your exact install CD's via Fed Ex at no charge to you. They will ask your serial number and other pertinent info. I guess they are required to do this only when it is requested.

Tip of the Day: HP has a voice activated phone that you can literally get lost in. Keeps saying "other" which is the fastest path to a live rep.

[theother]

I never had any of this on my WinXP systems.

I have custom built computers and not any preconfigured Dell, Sony, HP etc. systems.

I just have one partition used up to the the max. No problems.

WinXP doesn't need more than that.

As earlier said some computers have partitions for all that software that come pre-installed. Can be really messy for music systems.

[waxboy]

Yeah like the other posts above - HP can be a bit messy when it comes to partitions, however... they can be a very good thing in a pinch.

What I've noticed with some good HP machines that have AMD chips - is that if you turn off all the services you dont need, get an external drive (forget about partitioning... ive never noticed a speed difference, course I've also never tested it), and you should have a "somewhat" reliable machine.

keep all your audio on the external drive - and when (not "if") windows takes a leak on you - simply use the ghost partition to reinstall your OS. Youll probably have to do this every couple of months if youre on the internet (which means get a laptop or something cheap for surfing).

In this regard - HP can make a decent machine, they just dont tell you the secrets to manning it right I guess

[mwd]

Originally Posted by theother

I never had any of this on my WinXP systems. WinXP doesn't need more than that.

You won't see the 8mb partition as a drive letter. It is unnamed therefore hidden except to disk utilities. Also XP Home and portable computers do not support Dynamic Disk conversion so you may not see it if you use XP Home.

You will see it on a default installation of XP Pro or Windows 2000. I'm guessing he's using Pro.

[7161]

yeah HP, they are junk like all big corp pc's... wipe it, get a disk app from seagate or whoever, wipe the drive totaly and install a proper XP OS - I just had to do this on a mate's kid's pc last week when the stupid HP'd OS died.

[mwd]

The two most stable PC's I've ever had are HP. I do think HP is like every other mfg. maybe hit and miss with their ideas and I do feel I got lucky.

I bumped the memory to 1gb on my old 772n, loaded XP Pro, installed a SATA card in a machine that wasn't designed for it, installed a dual monitor card, put in a NEC DVD, converted it to SATA and put in (3) 74gb Raptors.

Made no power supply change, got rid of all the IDE cables, and this machine screams. The last and only blue screen I got was 4 years ago on a mouse driver conflict.

IMHO your computer is only as good as you are at upgrades, daily maintainence and thinking things through. I've seen the best of technology reduced to rubble in the hands of wanna'be'geeks.

I'm getting the urge to upgrade past 2.26ghz and 1GB memory limit and find myself hoping I get as lucky as I did with this HP.

[Mitch Manger]

I assume some of you have dealt with this, so....

If I want to backup images of both my Dell laptop's 80GB internal HD and each of the 3 partitions on my 300GB Glyph SATA drive (two paritions of which are FAT32), should I backup all 4 of these images to one giant 400gb partition? Or do I need to create 4 partitions on the backup drive, one for each ghost image?

Does Windows and/or Ghost have a difficult time recovering with Ghost images on external disks with multiple paritions like this?

I've also heard that you can't recover with such Ghost images on external drives using Firewire. I've heard that you can only use USB or take the external out of its case and use it as an internal drive. is that true?

Thanks,
Mitch

P.S. My maxtor just crapped out on me as I was trying to reformat it using PartitionMagic. I got this message:
Page_Fault_In_Nonpaged_Area
The problem seems to be caused by the following file: NTFS.sys
STOP: 0x00000050 (0xF7E0944E,0x00000001,0xF7405F4E,0x00000000)
Ntfs.sys - Address F7405F4E base at F74D4000, DateStamp 41107eea
Um, if anyone knows what this means, PM me. I googled "Page_Fault_In_Nonpaged_Area" and found nothing helpful in a text i could understand. Otherwise I'm donating my Maxtor HD to Goodwill, where hopefully someone knowledgable can fix it... It's not my RAM, because i tried the Maxtor on 2 other computers and it caused them to give me the same blue-screen-of-death. Its most likely a prob with my actual hd...

[theother]

Originally Posted by mwd

You won't see the 8mb partition as a drive letter. It is unnamed therefore hidden except to disk utilities. Also XP Home and portable computers do not support Dynamic Disk conversion so you may not see it if you use XP Home.

You will see it on a default installation of XP Pro or Windows 2000. I'm guessing he's using Pro.

I can't find anything on my system and I used all the space available for the one partition I created before installing WinXP Pro.

Take a look at the picture...

[AlexLakis]

That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen.

FDISK and reformat that shit. If you need to deal with Macs, make a 32 gig FAT32 partition, and run the rest on one NTFS partition. Always use a seperate physical drive for audio like you're doing.

Friggin Hewlett-Packard, I swear to God...

[simonv]

Yeah, use a partitioning utility to wipe everything, then do a clean install.
Throw away that HP rescue disk.. There's bunch of crap on there.

Once you have a freshly installed, configured, tweaked and ready-to-go installation, then use Norton Ghost or Acronis True Image to create a full backup image of your c: drive, and you'll never have to worry again.

Just put all of your personal files to a seperate partition. Don't leave anything on the C: drive (don't forget that what's on your desktop is on the C:). That way, if your system starts acting like crap, you just have to restore your backup and continue working 10 minutes later.

[Mitch Manger]

Does anyone know the answer to my question above about Ghost? Symantec is quite unhelpful, and did not provide an answer.

If I divide my (backup) 400gb hard drive up with one partition for each partition I am backing up, I will have 6 partitions! Please let me know i can just keep it simple with one partition with 6 ghost backup images in it...

Thanks,
Mitch

[mwd]

Originally Posted by theother

I can't find anything on my system and I used all the space available for the one partition I created before installing WinXP Pro. Take a look at the picture...

Don't know what to tell you. Once you get into windows unless you have more elaborate disk software you'll never see it again. You see it on the install because you are in a DOS mode.

Here is a shot of mine using the same XP Disk Manager you are using:



But when you look with Paragon Drive Backup you will see it:



However it is possible you just don't have it. You appear to have identical disk and notice your GB count. Same on all. Notice I am 1GB less on C.

You can read up on it here: MS Article 1 or MS Support

[theother]

I get the picture. Yes you are right there is always a bit leftover.

But what I tried to say is that this is nothing as a end-user I have to be concerned about. I just tell Windows to use everything available to create a single partition. What it does behing the scenes, I really don't care. (knocking on wood)