Hey guys, tomorrow(or should I say today being 1:41 AM) I receive my new motherboard. In case you all didn't know, I overclocked my old CPU which resulted in it frying, so I decided to upgrade my PC. I've been using my sister's laptop for the past few weeks. The last thing I need in the mail now is the motherboard. Now, my question is: When I setup the computer tomorrow, do you think it would be wise to partition the new hdd? If so, how much GB should be dedicated to the XP Professional installation, games, music, etc? The new HDD is 160 GB. I bought the new hdd to install windows on again, and have my two other hdds(240 gb total) with my old information on them. So, should I partition the new hdd, send files from the old hdds to the new one, reformat the old hdds, and then partition those? Any help would be great at this point.
You dont gain a performance boost if you split 1 hdd If you had multiple HDDs and did a stripe set (raid 5 i think?) then read times would be faster, not sure if there is any fault tolerance though.
RAID 0 is the striped set, 1 is mirrored and 5 is striped with parity. There are no performance boosts with straight partitioning (though you can get some minor boosts because of lower fragmentation in theory), but you can make the file and directory structure tailored to your liking. For instance, I use the same drive structure on my laptop (partitions) and my desktop (separate drives): system drive, working drive, gaming drive and a storage drive.
It's always good to partition your hd, it helps alot in saving time if you have to reinstall things and/or reformat / update your OS. Of course, this is not the 100% case under windows, but under linux this works great. It doesnt boot your pc, not at all, it just helps to keep things organized, and maybe it gives you a bit more security.
It's worth offloading Window's virtual memory to a second (physical) hdd. If you've got some identical drives RAID is also worth a look, the performance gains can be surprisingly high.
My idea was to partition multiple drives as stated above. I wasn't really looking for performance boost, but safety more than anything. If I have a problem in one part of the drive, then I could just reformat that and not the whole drive. If I did partition, I would probably make it like: C:\ Windows XP D:\ Games E:\ School Files F: \ Music files etc. Before my computer CPU fried, I had my HDDs RAIDed. They are both 120 GB Seagates. Should I just partition the new hdd, and then RAID the other two again? Thanks guys for the help so far.
Well, if the problem is physical (most HDD issues are, they're pretty sensitive), you'd probably be screwed either way. For safety, RAID is the way forwards. I can't remember the RAID number now, one of them will half your potential storage (ie turn 2 100gb drives into 1 100gb drive) but be recoverable if one of drive fails.
Just keep the 160gig as it is. Partitioning it isn't worth it. I would guess your old HDDs (are they both 120gig and by the same manufacturer?) are IDE, not SATA. If they are IDE then you will need an IDE raid card in order to have RAID 1 (mirrored, which is fault tolerance, if one HDD fails you can use the spare one instead. What motherboard did you buy? It probably has onboard SATA RAID but probably not IDE RAID. Also, what kind of HDD did you buy? Seagate? WEstern Digital? Those two I'd recommend, especially seagate because they have a longer warranty than WD. OVerall, just put all 3 HDDs in there. Use the 160 as XP drive, the second for games, and the third for music and other documents. Allocate the swap file from the C: drive (default) onto the third drive. You will gain some loading and offloading time when exiting from a game and back into windows if the swap file is all on a drive that isn't on the boot drive. IF you have a DVD burner, periodically back up your irrecoverable data like music, etc. and keep archiving it everytime you put in new music, documents, etc. Its always good to have multiple backups, not just rely on one solution.
Good advice. Only thing I'd add is, if you have IDE HDD's and a motherboard with some SATA ports going unused, buy a couple of IDE-SATA converters. You'll get marginal performance gains, and freeing up the IDE bus means your DVD/CD drives will perform better.
Hey, all the HDDs I have are SATA. The motherboard is an DFI Lanparty CFX3200. The newest hdd is western digital. The other two are seagate.
Then what you can do with those SATA drives is first, move all the data from those two 120gigs onto the 160gig. All the music, documents and save files, anything you can't recover. Then do a good low-level format on both of those hard drives by using this software called Killdisk (google it). After that, set those two hard drives up as RAID 1 (mirrored) and install Windows XP on that. Put back all your music files, and irrecoverable data onto the RAID array and make sure the automatic duplication is on so that you don't have to duplicate the data from the first disk onto the second one manually (I learned that hard way on another RAID card..). Then use the 160gig HDD for your games, etc. and swap file allocation. You're gonna need a spare HDD to install windows on it using ur new hardware and transfer the files from the 120gig to the 160gig and then reinstall it all with the method I just described or use second computer to do all the transfering from the 120gigs onto the 160gig if it has at least 2 SATA ports.. In the end, you'll end up with one HDD that is 120gigs but its also backing up that hDD onto the second 120gig and you'll have a third HDD (which XP will see as D: drive) and that will ahve your games and programs installed onto it.
Hmm...I installed Windows and everything on the new HDD, but now when I just plugged in the old HDDs and hit explore, it says, "Drive needs to be formatted. Format now?" When I went to properties, it shows the old HDDs as being 0.00 gb used...what's up?
Let me ask you this..... Do you have any back up whatsoever of any music or d ocuments you have in something other than those HDDs? If not, then that means your fucked.... Don't do anything yet. Hold off on formatting, etc. on those drives. I'll figure out why its saying that. Maybe there is a way out... I'll get back to you tomorrow when I'm at work. Do you remember formatting those drives originally as either "Basic" or "Dynamic"? Don't format as Dynamic that is probably why you're getting that message that you need to format. Let me see if there is a way you can save those drives but don't get your hopes high...
If it's SATA or IDE, you generally only want apps on the primary. I usually pick a smaller drive with fast access, then mirror it. It has a small performance hit, but the data safety is well worth it. I would install, set the computer controlled virtual mem file manually so it doesn't get fragmented as time goes by. Some people say put vitru mem on another drive, but that only works if the device is on a seperate ide controller, otherwise speed will suffer, and if the drive fails, you might get some XP crash that will require repairs, esp if drive"d" once a hdd with the virt mem is now an optical device and you get a BSOD. When I format, I would use the largest cluster size possible for speed, you'll lose only a little space. Most files are very big, and the benefit of the more efficient cluster sizes doesn't pay off. Also,with ide, the ide drives are only as fast as the slowest device. If you have a fast ide drive on the same channel with a slow cd-rom, the cd-rom will drag down performance. Once the os is on, you can right click on my computer in xp and go to "manage" You would set the drive to active if there is a bootable os on it. As to your partition problems on your old drives: You might have had them ad dynamic disks, that will cause that error. You'll need to get a RAW DATA recovery program and read the data that way. It's a bit more complex, but not so bad. or XP if very forgiving, if you have the original drive with OS, plug it into the new board as the primary, boot it to safe mode, and then transfer all the data off it and the other drives to new drives. Xp will plug and play for a bit, but who needs sound or lan settings, you just need the partitions to be usable again. Sure beats slow raw data recovery.
Dont worry. Talked to him and its just a mis-installation of the drives... Looks like we might get it working 8)
I hate sata connectors with a passion, ide might have been bigger, but when it was connected, it stayed connected. Sata2 has the locking parts but who has even seen any of those drives yet??
SATA2 has been out for a while. From the PCs I have built, I've only come across two motherboards that actually came with SATA cables that have metal clips on them to ensure that they are locked. There is a difference between SATA1 cables and 2. The cable itself will state if its SATA2 or not. The cables actually stay on there pretty well. IDE does stick on there much better than SATA, but sometimes it is on there so tight that when you try to pull out the IDE cable from the HDD, you end up braking the cable from the connector! Or the plastic tabs break. The tightness on the SATA is just fine. Anyway, we fixed the problem!
Yeah, problem solved, thanks MadHatter . Oddly enough, none of my music files of word documents were there...I couldn't retrieve much at all. Still though, it was a great learning experience.
