Here is an excellent guide about HD Partitions

[joeMan]

how would you know?

Well, whenever I've had a corrupted file the actaul name of the problematic file appears on the screen whenever the boot fails, but I am no OS guru so maybe that means the registry is hosed too.

But anyway, I have to agree with you about just going the whole 9 yards, I mean I guess it is the freshest cleanest way. It's just that it is very time consuming when I go through all the Koroush Ghazi tweaks, you know. It's like, when I get the no boot message (which isn't that often at all - I usually bring it upon myself from doing dumb $4!t).

I guess I want a way that if things get irrepairable and I have to do a complete wipe, and re-install- that I can just literally put the whole shabang back on to a freshly formatted HD, just the way it was at my last "save", or "snapshot", or "backup" or whatever. So I don't have to go through all the little utility installs and patches and tweaks and everything. It seriously can take me like a full day to get it all back where I like it.

I've been meaning to look into things like the Acronis Disk Director Suite that Paragon reviewed, or Norton Ghost or something like that.

What do you use? Anything like this?

And, what about the built in XP backup utility, where you check the drives and/or folders to backup - and then check "System State" too s it saves all your current system settings...is this tool not looked on highly amongst those in the know?

[ThugsRook]

my XP is configured very very different from yours im sure.....

i run FAT32 so i can fix the OS from DOS.

redundant backups = disabled
prefetch = disabled
driver backups = disabled
dll backups = disabled
dll cache = disabled
driver cache = disabled
debug = disabled
windows file protection (WFP) = disabled!
rollbacks = disabled
error reporting = disabled
error logging = disabled
system restore = disabled
remote garbage = disabled
75% of the services = disabled

its freakin Win98se on a NT kernal

[joeMan]

Your in the trenches doin it raw.

Cool.

[ThugsRook]

thats the way prefer it, yes

id still be on w98se if it was still correctly supported (its not)

[ThugsRook]

...and then check "System State" too s it saves all your current system settings...is this tool not looked on highly amongst those in the know?

i use the "files and settings transfer wizard" to backup my profile to my d drive. that does backup most program settings but not all.

[Jeremy]

Hey, that's a great link! I came in here all confused about partitions (I'm studying for my MCDST) but that straightened out a lot of questions I had about partitions, basic disks, and dynamic disks.

So, just to ensure I understand, the only reason why I would use logical partitions inside of an extended partition is if I wanted to partition a volume (not a drive, a volume which may span several disks) into more than four partitions. Is that correct?

[KoolDrew]

That site is terrible. I know you posted this to help the community out, but that site has false information and bad advice in a few articles. Especially when it comes to the pagefile.

It is best to have as least partitions as possible. I have one HDD and 2 partitions. One is for storage while the other is for everything else. This way I can reformat the first partition and still hvae all my Music, saved games etc. in my Storage partition. All having them in sperate partitions would do is increase seek times when acessing something on another partition. This is especially bad if the pagefile is on a seperate partition, but on the same physical drive. Also fragmentation is not as big of an issue as that article and defrag vendors want you to believe. This is because the head will have to move anyway with all the IOs to many other files.

[Snafu]

First try rebooting again.

If you still do not see them then have a look under Disk Management in the Computer Management section (Control Panel>Administrative Tools). Does the system see the drives/partitions? BTW this is for XP. I am not sure where it would be in vista or 7.

[Dave3d]

For xp and vista, right click My Computer > Manage > Disk MAnagement.

For win7, right click My Computer > Properties > Advanced? > Disk Management.