Basic partition questions

[slinky22]

I know what a partition is by definition, but not in real world terms. I have a few simple questions.

1. How do you see your partitions?

2. Can you create, remove, or resize partitions at a time other than just before installing your OS? If so, how?

3. If I'm booting under a specific partition, by default, can I access files stored on another partition without booting under it?

4. Other than running two different OS, why would anyone need another partition? Are there any performance benefits etc?

 

[oldman420]

Hey slinky,
when you partition a drive what happens is the OS creates more than one disk on the same drive.
overall more than one partition will slow down a drive but not enough to notice really.
Each partition will be visible in the drives management console to see this go to,start,right click my computer and choose manage.
when the console opens you will see disk management and can then see the partitions,the OS will see each partition as a separate drive.
you can manage live partitions using partition magic or some other utilities.
with todays drives being so big there is really no need to have more than one part per drive IMHO.

 

[slinky22]

Thanks for the reply. I'm currently running both Win98 and Win2k (lazy upgrade) but what you showed me only detects one partition. Is it possible to run two OS on the same partition is this a mistake?

 

[oldman420]

its possible to run 2 osses on the same part but it could get messy also you will have to run 2000 on fat32 instead of ntfs, thats not too good but will work.
heres where 2 partitions is handy,format one fat for 98 and the other ntfs for 2000, better yet get rid of 98 altogether.

 

[Navid]

1- If you have drive C and drive D both on a hard drive, you can see them by just going to "My computer". Each is on a different partition. In XP, you can see your partitions by going to disk management utility.

2- You can use Partitoin magic to do that. There is also a free utility that I have heard would let you do that.
http://www.ranish.com/part/

3- Yes, as long as the operating system you are booting can access the format type of the other partition. For example, 98 cannot see NTFS.

4- If you have more than one hard drive, you can put the pagefile on the other hard drive on its own partition. This may help performance if you need more RAM, for the type of applications you run, than you have on your machine.
http://support.microsoft.com/d...x?scid=kb;en-us;314482

If you create images of your OS for fast recovery, instead of re-install, you may want to install the OS on one partition, but, put your large data files on another partition. Then, your images will be smaller and easier to manage.