Disk Partitioning
Partitioning Primer
Example
A picture is worth a thousand words, and the picture below shows the layout of a system with two drives and several partitions. This is a shot of the standard Disk Manager tool in Windows XP.
This system contains two disks, 20 GB and 40 GB. The first is divided into a primary partition for the operating system and installed programs, plus two volumes in an extended partition: one for all normal data, the other for the paging file, the TEMP directory, and anything else of a transient nature. It also contains a small special primary partition at the end used by BootIt-NG, one of the products reviewed in this issue.
The second drive is arranged as one extended partition divided into three logical volumes. The first, occupying the largest slice, is for video files, the second is just 1 GB and has been reserved for CD-writing software (including XP's built-in function) to create images before burning, while the third is used for backup files. In particular, this is used to hold image files of the system and data partitions, which can later be copied to CD. This backup partition is the only one to use the FAT filesystem, because DOS-based partitioning programs need to be able to read and write image files on it. The remaining partitions (apart from the BootIt one) are only used by Windows XP, and are formatted as NTFS.
This arrangement is mainly to ensure safety and reliability. All non-recoverable user data is stored on D. and regularly backed up to F. Everything on C is recoverable in that it can all be re-installed, but as this is time-consuming, periodic image backups are made, also to F. Image backups of D are made to F at the same time. The backups on F are periodically copied to CD.
All temporary and transient data is stored on T, so it doesn't bloat the backups with unnecessary files. Video files on E are too large to back up, and can be recovered from tape if disaster falls. A dedicated video volume also helps optimise speed. The R volume is the workspace for XP's built-in CD recording, and has been added to ensure that space for an image file is always available; also by being on a different physical disk from the original files it speeds up the process.
Keeping the OS and installed software separate from general data is a good strategy for reliability, for two reasons.
- If the OS partition runs out of space, Windows can become fatally damaged and require re-installation to recover. If the partition only contains installed software this is much less likely to happen.
- If the OS should need re-installing, then if the data is in a separate partition the OS partition can be re-formatted and a clean re-install done without needing to unravel data from software.
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