Hi all, at the weekend I am going to be fitting a new HD 160GB in place of my 80GB. The 80 has 4 partitions - C,D,E & F, these are Boot, Backup, Recover and Data. When I fit the new HD I am going to do an install of XP Home from the i386 folder that I have extracted from my 'recovery' CD using winnt32.exe (I've got all the numbers and things. I've put this on its own CD for ease. Now, I am looking for advise on what sort of size and how many partitions to create on the new 160HD. I would like to have XP in its own partition, with plenty of room for all the 'bits' that get put onto 'C' even when you have told the prog. to install to 'D'. 'D' to be used for 'Program Files', 'E' to be used as a 'Ghost' partition for 'C', and 'F' as ???. I expect that I will be reformatting my 80GB to two partitions, one to be used for Data and the other for Downloads. I hope all this makes sense, I would be grateful for any comments or suggestions. All the best John

I like the way you break up your system. kinda like my own. Have you considered saving all of your own personal files ( i do this too) to the last partition? I have NOTHING on "C" I couldnt replace if it went ka-boom. then its just a case or reinstalling software. Also, have you considered moving your My Documents folder to that partition, too? Thyat way, whaterv you've saved across the system endds up safe on another partition.

Hi clubjunkie, as you will have noticed, my '80' is going to hold my 'data', one thing though I had forgotten that it is possible to to move 'My Documents', that will be moved as well. Thanks for the input, John

Just some food for thought. It's good to be organized. One place for this and another for that. But still you're putting all your eggs in one basket. Ponder if you will, A problem with the drive itself. You have a failure of the controller chip or the firmware chip. Or my favorite a good old fashion head crash. Four partitions on one drive, all your goodies, gone. I had a drive problem that when tested said there was not a partition. All my programs and my xp os were unreachable. No matter what I tried it was no joy. I found out later it was a hiccup in the firmware. I had just done a full drive back up 3 days before. I lucked out to be honest. A stack of 100 48x cd's will run about 30 bucks. Do backups often. Disks are cheap.

"A stack of 100 48x cd's will run about 30 bucks. Do backups often. Disks are cheap." I don't know where you live or what brand you're buying, but a stack of 100 generic 52x cdr's only cost $14 here in orange county, ca. Get yourself a 4x dvd+-rw for $79 at most any computer store, pick up a 50 pack of dvd-r's for $45, and use norton ghost to do your backups :) you can find the burners cheap at www.tigerdirect.com or www.outpost.com