Benefits of partitioning HDD

[kyjet]

Hi all. I have 2 20gig HDD and have win98se as the OS. I plan to install win2k as the second OS. I also have Parittion Magic 6 installed together with it's Boot Magic. Before I proceed to install Win2k, I wonder if there's any benefit in partitioning my HDD ?

Would appreciate any comments.

Cheers.

[nsu]

It is perhaps better to have separate partitions for different OS. If you are happy with one OS, you can format only one partition. If you run the same program under two different OS, eg Win98 and Win2k, you would like to install them to a different partition or drive letter. Otherwise, files may conflict, eg programs installed under the c:\program files directory and in some common files directories.

If later you decide to only run one OS, with Win2k, you can mount one partition as a directory. Eg you have a D:, then you are sick of putting stuff in D:, then you can mount your D: under say, C:/stuff_in_D. Not very sure if Win98 can mount this way. Have never used Win98 or WinME.

If you only have one partition, and you want a new drive letter. You can mark a directory for "Share", and map this directory to a new drive letter from the network share.

All the MS OS in the old days including NT4's basic files could only be installed in the boot drive, I mean the basic files like NTDETECT.COM, ntldr. MSDOS.sys etc. Not sure about modern MS OS or the "Boot Magic".

[q9]

It is essential to have win98 and win2k on separate partitions. Otherwise you will have many problems with default install directories. Try installing media player 7 in win 98 and see how well it works after you install it for win2k. Microsoft says two partitions is the only way, and from experience I can tell you it is the only way.

[sonyfier]

Originally posted by kyjet
Hi all. I have 2 20gig HDD and have win98se as the OS. I plan to install win2k as the second OS. I also have Parittion Magic 6 installed together with it's Boot Magic. Before I proceed to install Win2k, I wonder if there's any benefit in partitioning my HDD ?

Would appreciate any comments.

Cheers.

Firstly you won't need boot magic........

Here's the way I did it which is quite simple:

Use partition magic from within win98 and create an extended logical partition in the NTFS file system DO NOT MAKE IT ACTIVE. The partition while you are in windows 98 will not be seen, from within partiion magic it will have no drive designation and appear as *.

Shutdown and reboot using the 4 boot floppies/install disc's for Win2000 and install win2000 in the *. partition when asked where to install.
Don't worry that it doesn't have a drive letter asignment yet as it will when your in win2K and will appear as D: and win98 will still appear as C: .

When win2000 installs and you restart computer you will have a dual boot system menu that was installed by windows 2000 and you will have 30 seconds to choose which OS you wish to run, win2k will be default it boots into if you don't select and time runs out.

After your done:
If you wish you can also create another extended logical partition using Fat 32 file system and this partion will be visible to both operating systems.................I use this for storing files etc that both operating systems can use as well as files I'm accumalating before archiving and burning to disc.

The benefit in this way is that should one of the OS or Both OS or partitions become unstable or you can't get in then your important files at least should be safe on another partition or drive.

As you have 2 drives you can elect to partition one and have both OS on it and keep second for data or....... put OS on both............it's really up to you.


If you don't have the win2000 boot floppies and wish to start the install process of win2000 from within win98 but NOT upgrade over it you may be able to do so using the following method...... (This works for XP) Using partition magic create a fat 32 extended logical partition instead of an NTFS one...................this will allow the partion you wish to install too be visible from within 98 ................. then choose to install to this new partition (likely D: Drive) during the install win2k asks whether you wan't to convert partition to NTFS....... allow it to change the Fat32 partition you recently made to NTFS. All the rest of installation will proceed as it did doing it from dos.

No matter what you do don't ever create another partition and set it as active especially an NTFS one or you will lose the ability to boot into win98 from dos as it will hide the win98 partition because you can't have 2 active partitions at once.

Have fun :)

[nsu]

Originally posted by sonyfier


Use partition magic from within win98 and create an extended logical partition in the NTFS file system DO NOT MAKE IT ACTIVE. The partition while you are in windows 98 will not be seen, from within partiion magic it will have no drive designation and appear as *.

No matter what you do don't ever create another partition and set it as active especially an NTFS one or you will lose the ability to boot into win98 from dos as it will hide the win98 partition because you can't have 2 active partitions at once.

Have fun :)

If I remember right, you can't actually set a extended partition "active". Some boot mangers let you boot from extended partitions for some OS, but not all.:) I think you can't create two primary partitions on the same drive with MS OS. Some partition programs or other OS (OS/2, Linux etc) allow you do so with the maximum of 4 primary partitions on one hard drive.

With a multiple primary partitions system, you should be able to use MS's fdisk (naturally Linux's fdisk can do too) to select which primary partition to be the "active" partition.

I have not played with partitions for a while, so please correct me if I was wrong.:)

[sonyfier]

Originally posted by nsu


If I remember right, you can't actually set a extended partition "active". Some boot mangers let you boot from extended partitions for some OS, but not all.:) I think you can't create two primary partitions on the same drive with MS OS. Some partition programs or other OS (OS/2, Linux etc) allow you do so with the maximum of 4 primary partitions on one hard drive.

With a multiple primary partitions system, you should be able to use MS's fdisk (naturally Linux's fdisk can do too) to select which primary partition to be the "active" partition.

I have not played with partitions for a while, so please correct me if I was wrong.:)

It maybe unique to the way partition magic 7 does it but..... you can or at least I managed to a month or so ago when playing with XP :(

when I was creating a partition Partition Magic asked whether I wanted to install an operating system to the partition which I answered yes..........it then asked whether you wan't to set it as active which I did..............the result is your c: partition is no longer the primary active boot the NTFS partition you have set as active becomes your primary boot partition and unless you have the emergency partition magic dos discs to change the active partion back to c: your stuffed because you can no longer boot into win98 and you can't install win2000 from the CD unless you have the boot floppies. So effectively you have a dead machine with inaccessable OS
This is the best I can recall what happened but I did manage to lock myself out because of the active status of partitions:(

With a dual boot system anyway it was my understanding that even though you have installed win2000 or XP to an extended partition it is changed depending on what OS you choose to boot from.......ie the dual boot program or whatever which resides in base of C:\ directory juggles the active status of the partitions depending on what you boot into.?

Could be confused here and wrong on relating from memory what happened and definately not going to try recreating it ;) but definately no matter what type of partitions you create C:\ should remain the only one set as active where C:\ has 98 installed.

[jim chase]

My prefference on a dual boot system, usually linux and windows, is to have at least three partitions. One for each os and a shared partition in fat32 for data and driver storage.

When I don't dual boot I always have a second partition for storing data and drivers etc. incase the os dies.

Jim

[gilles lussier]

You don't need Bootmagic to dual boot win98 and win2k. When you start installing win2k, you will be asked where you want to have-it installed, select the first partition on the second drive. The win2k installer will even create a bootmenu for you.

As for the number of partitions, with 2 20gb drive, I would have 2 partitions on each drive, this way you could ghost win2k on the second partition of the first drive and ghost win98 onto the second partition of the second drive, the remainder of the space on these partitions could be used for data, drivers and downloads.