Drive Image and Partition Magic

[jim.t]

from PowerQuest. Does anyone have any pearls of wisdom to share that might keep me outta trouble? I'm gonna backup the system this weekend and partition the HD. Hopefully, these apps have wizards that guide you thru each step or easy to read instructions.

[jim.t]

I hear ya. I've got a fairly new (3 weeks) system that has 37gb usable. I wanted to partition into about 3 parts, but wasn't sure how much to allocate. I figured about 5gb for the c-drive(OS+), 20 gb for a general part and the rest for special needs. Is there any problem with going over 2gb for the OS part?? And, what do you think of the partitioning.

[Dave_H]

You still will have the same limitations with the file types so don't try to go over 2gb unless it is a FAT32 or NTFS partition.

(My 2 cents)
Make sure that you create the rescue disks so in case you make a mistake you can change things back. Also, take the time before you do anything to run your system thru a compleate and thorough scandisk and defrag.

Personally, I have never had a problem with either product and use DI all the time as a backup routine.
Best of luck,
Dave

[jim.t]

FAT32...shouldn't I be partitioning all three of my parts with FAT32? I'm running WinME and a new PC...don't particularly care about the small size. I concur about the rescue disks...sounds like a smart way to go, sort of like backing up the HD before you go messing with it. What do you think about my part sizes?

[daverme]

The partitioning is a very personal thing and all depends on your specific needs. Let me try to illustrate. I, myself, have very few apps on my PC and not much data either. I'm using about 1.6 Gig of a 15 Gig C: drive and have a 341 MEG (yes, MEG) D: drive for data. My wife, on the other hand is a HOG for new toys; she loads her C: drive up with everything that comes along that sounds interesting. In general, her C: drive needs to be larger than her D: drive and it doesn't really matter about mine cuz I don't put anything in either of them!

So what R U gonna do with this PC? If you like lots of games and don't have many data files then maybe your C: drive should be the larger one. If you plan to run a business and will have several data bases on the machine then, by all means, make the D: drive the larger one (and back it up often!).

If it were me and I wanted to keep programs and data seperate (which I believe is wise) then I (that's me, personally) would make all the partitions the same size and forget about it. For me, it's difficult to imagine filling up even a third of a 37 Gig drive.

[daverme]

I have both products and I swear by Drive Image for backups (all I've ever used is the cloning feature); Partition Magic I'm not so sure of. I recently upgraded Drive Image to the 4.0 release because my original release (2.0) has a real annoying characteristic. The product allows you to copy a partition into a smaller space, if the amount of data in the partition you are copying will fit into the smaller space. Release 2.0, however, shrinks the destination partition ONLY AFTER it has copied the whole source partition, free space and all; release 4.0 does it right, and defines the destination partition at the desired size then does the copy. The defaults for 2.0 also force an integrity check that takes FOREVER. It can be turned off but you need to know to do it (click the "advanced" button in the last screen before the copy); this feature is off by default in 4.0, making for a much faster copy. Release 4.0 also supports Zip drives and CD-RW drives.

After using Partition Magic rather feverishly after I first got it, I have been staying away from it of late. I re-partitioned a 15GB Maxtor drive a coupla times and when I subsequently installed it in another PC, the BIOS did not see the drive size nor the "mode" correctly. FDISKing and reFORMATig made that probelem go away but I was not so lucky with a 4.3GB Seagate. After re-partitioning the Seagate, the BIOS in the PC saw the "mode" as CHS when it should have been LBA. The drive always worked correctly and Windows always saw the size correctly but having something quirky happen left me kinda queezy.

[jim.t]

I'm gonna probably need alot of space for music tracks...I do alot of beach music gathering and editting(which takes up some room), and my wife likes to have her space for her documents and such. Is there any reason why I should have more than 5 gb for my c:drive if I'm gonna put apps on another partition? I know when I've added apps(mostly to another drive) the OS always uses up a certain amount of space on c:drive(windows stuff). I have another PC (P-166 3.2gb) that I've partitioned to 1gb on c:drive and the rest on d:drive, and I've had to keep a constant watch on C(defrag,etc.).

[scotter]

with windows Me I would make the C drive at least 5 gig to 10
one thing to watch and mabe reset is the amount of space me uses for the system restore buy defalt it WILL USE 1.5gig's of drive C.
if you into device mangler, Performance, file system, then you can change that amount down to 200meg max.

if you do not want to use the system restore program and free up all that hard drive space while in the filesystem of device mangler go into trouble shooting and disable
system restore from there.

Then your going to have to go into C:\_restore change the veiw to Show all files, hidden system files to
beable to see the temp file open it and delete every thing thats in there>

hope that helps ya http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif

[jim.t]

Thanks, not sure what I'm gonna do with the system backup function just yet.

I was reading about Partition Magic, and as I understand it, there could be some problems with NAV and some other apps if they are not disabled and shut down before running PM. Does anyone know about this??

When using Drive Image, do most people make an image backup onto another drive area as routine, or is it proper to off load to CD/RW? I'm trying to get a feel for this new kind of maintenance.






[This message has been edited by jim.t (edited 02-12-2001).]