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Josephthewise

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partitioning one Hard Drive

hi. im trying to partition my hard drive so it would think that it is actually two hard drives. one would be labeled thawspace and the other my main save area. i dont not have enough funds to go out and buy a new HDD to install in to the computer. please help
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cyberdevil67

Hi Josephthewise,

 Hmmm, without a program alled partition magic you could be in trouble. You will need to back up the computer and drive resizing the main partition to something smaller using fdisk or disk management. But if you had partition magic it would mamke your job even easier.

Cheers!
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you can backup your data, install your OS from fresh, delete the existing partition, and create those 2 you want.
you can use Partition magic to do this on an existing partition, but still, backup everything first !

here a free one :

Ranish partition manager :


http://www.ranish.com/part/
Download knoppix from http://knoppix.net This is a fully functional linux version running directly off a CD. There is not much need to learn linux to use this CD, as it starts in to a GUI similar to that of Windows (KDE). In this Linux distribution there is a utility called "QtParted". This utility will allow you do the same thing as partitionmagic or acronis disc director suite will do, but for free.

Before you do any manipulation on your disks (this is true in any case, you should allways do this regularly), make a good backup and test it by restoring some random data and opening it. Although it may be unlikely, it is allways possible that you loose all your data, maybe through missuse, disk crashes etc.
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Watzman

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yeah, why do you want to partition it?
Hi Josephthewise,

After you re-partiiton, another option is (if you are using Windows 2000 or XP) to convert your basic disk to a dynamic disk, and then you can resize it on the fly, or if you add another hard drive down the line (lets say you get a 200GB drive) you can "add" it to your C: drive. So in the computer, you would have 2 physical drives, but in windows you would still have 1 c: or d: drive, but it would be 200GB bigger now.

--Zaheer
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the reason i want to partition the drive is because im told it will make the comp think it has more space and will go a bit faster
I think what you are driving at is that a smaller partition will use smaller clusters, which is more efficient for smaller files and therefore doesn't waste as much space if there are many small files around. This won't really make it go faster, though. You might be able to get speed improvements with partitioning if you reserve one partition for your pagefile and then also use a fixed sized pagefile in that partition. This will make sure there is no defragmentation there.

To get your system to run noticeably faster, I'd first do the following:

Add RAM. I'm assuming you are using windows XP or 2000. XP will need at least 256 MB to run at an acceptable rate, the more RAM you can add the better. 2000 runs OK with less, but otherwise the same rule applies, the more the faster.
You can also make a fixed size for your pagefile by not making a separate partition, though. You'll probably get most speed increase by deleting your temporary files plus emptying your recycle bin (include the norton defragmentation bin if you have nav or other norton stuff installed. When this is done, disable any pagefile and then defrag your disk. It may help to do that in safe mode, as there are less programs and services interfering in that mode. Once your disk is defraged make a fixed size pagefile. The size of this pagefile depends on your current configuration and on how you are using your PC. Again, if you are using XP, the general pagefile size reccomendation is 1.5 times the size of your RAM. This suggestion is OK if you are using only the minimum of RAM, up to 512 MB, maybe. If you have more RAM I'd try making the pagefile as small as possible, as paging will allways take time, but access to RAM is much faster. This may need some testing and trying out on your part. It also depends on how you work and how many programs and services are running at the same time, and it also depends on the sizes of open files. The more, the more memory you need, and if that memory can't be satisfied by your RAM, the system will use the pagefile for that... so it depends on how you use your PC. Good testing and tweaking!
a faster disk helps too, and not selecting small pictures or pictograms for the explorer display will help a bit too
here some links for speeding up the pc :

http://www.google.be/search?hl=nl&q=speed+up+PC&meta=