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Help with a hard drive.

Brian

Graduate Poster
B
Joined
Jul 27, 2001
Messages
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I put an old HD into my computer and installed XP on it. It's a Quantum Fireball. It's 30 gigs, but windows only sees it as 13 gigs. I think I may have partitioned it wrong. Is there a free tool I can use to change the partition size? Can I even do that on the drive with windows installed?
Any help would be appreciated, I've spent far to many hours screwing with my computer these last few days.
 
Brian said:
I put an old HD into my computer and installed XP on it. It's a Quantum Fireball. It's 30 gigs, but windows only sees it as 13 gigs. I think I may have partitioned it wrong. Is there a free tool I can use to change the partition size? Can I even do that on the drive with windows installed?
Any help would be appreciated, I've spent far to many hours screwing with my computer these last few days.
Click to expand...
You can try
PartitionMagic
or this freebie:
Ranish Partitioner

If your going to go with the Ranish option, read the info carefully.
 
I'll swim against the stream here!

Don't bother trying to play with the partitions now. 13GB is more than adequate for a system partition plus as much layered software as you might reasonably cram into the box. I'm betting you will find it will be 80% free most of the time!

Instead, find the Disk Managment tool on your system (if it's an NT-based system), and manage the unused 17GB disk space as you would like through that mechanism. You can create, delete and manage partitions easily enough, so have a think about what you want to do with your system, then go for it! The only one you can't remove is the system partition.

And just make sure you defrag them all now and then - once a month is more than enough, usually.

Hint: Windows always ends up fragmenting the pagefile during install, which affects subsequent performance noticeably. Want to defrag it for free? Try this: Use Disk Manager to create a new partition that is exactly the size of the pagefile you want. Then use the System Performance tools to create a pagefile in that partition, and remove the one on the system partition. Reboot, defrag the system, and you have done the job!

Hint 2 (for techie nerds): For improved IO performance, do the same thing, but put the pagefile partition on a different IO bus to the system partition disk.
 
Uh, a 13Gb hard drive 80% free most times??? That comes out to 2.6 Gb in use. On my machine (Mac, started with 70 Gb free, 80 Gb hd), I have about 35 Gb free, I dont have many huge programs, and no huge documents, but when you put all this stuff together, it takes up quite a bit of space.


I guess it depends, though, I use this machine every day, and I am a packrat, I have another windows 98 machine which is only used for amateur radio, and I have used very little of it's 4Gb hard drive.

As far as partitioning goes, try Partition Magic, it is easy to use, pretty fast, and works with most types of partitions, you could either create a new partition in the empty space (as long as your BIOS recognises that your hard drive is 30Gb), or resize your current partition. The new partition option is faster, and less likley to screw up your data (PM is pretty safe though). Do make sure that you defrag your computer, and then run PM immediatly after startup.
 
Thanks everyone. I fiddled and tweaked and deleted and installed and repeated. I have Win 98 and an XP upgrade disk so the reinstalls were a real treat.
Then I said screw it, took it out and got the 20 gig western digital out of the closet and installed that instead.
All the better, I think the WD is 7200 RPM, the other was slower.

That other one has me wondering though. I don't know if it's defective or what. Win98 wanted me to make it FAT32.

Thanks again.
 
cesium said:
Uh, a 13Gb hard drive 80% free most times??? That comes out to 2.6 Gb in use. On my machine (Mac, started with 70 Gb free, 80 Gb hd), I have about 35 Gb free, I dont have many huge programs, and no huge documents, but when you put all this stuff together, it takes up quite a bit of space.

I guess it depends, though, I use this machine every day, and I am a packrat, I have another windows 98 machine which is only used for amateur radio, and I have used very little of it's 4Gb hard drive.
Click to expand...
Well, I wasn't being too literal with those numbers! Clearly it's horses for courses! ;)

What I mean is that if you keep your burgeoning data files off the system partition, (a) your OS plus the usual set of apps will most likely take up way less than 13GB, (b) the partition usually won't fill up rapidly after install, and (c) it won't get too fragmented much either.

Another techie hint: If you have really large disk partitions, the clustersize in each partition will likely be big as well, so you use up disk space more rapidly and less efficiently as a result (especially if you use small files).* A possible solution is to use smaller partitions and more of them, but then that may be more complicated for the user to work with! Trade-off...





*This is why FAT-16 limits disk sizes to 2GB - it has a maximum clustersize and cluster count that multiply out to 2GB. FAT-32 ("large disk support" in Win98) overcomes this to some extent, but NTFS (on NT systems) is an altogether better solution to the problem. Clustersize concerns are not limited to MS systems either...
 
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