Naked Science Forum
Non Life Sciences => Geek Speak => Topic started by: Titanscape on 25/08/2009 17:32:24
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Hi, I bought Windows XP 2 days ago, installation went well, until in use, I found I only had 700 Mb left from a 80 Gig drive. I partitioned 3.5 Gig, and 3 gig, and the rrest free, but in my computer, it doesn't show. Should I start again? How should I partition?
Presently I have drive C and D. The rest is lost.
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Go into
Control panel/adminstrative tools and then click on computer managment.
Once it loads click on disk managment and see what you have got in their.
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Thanks, I checked, the computer recognises their is drive C, D and mentions free space 69 gigs. Should I defragment, or will it simply be accesible as is? It isn't locked from use is it?
Othersise I have 2 gigs left in drive D, which is only a small partition. I take it XP doesn't need swap space? I was using Linux for a year.
Now also I am warned of low disk space on drive C.
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I have been advised to start again, with two partitions 20 and 60 of 80 gigs. And to put info on the 60 gigs drive D.
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Although xp does not use a swap space like Linux it does use a page file system of around 2gb but that's done automatic and part of the main drive.
With a drive of 80gb I would personally split it with C=50gb and D=30 gb. The drive containing XP (normally C) should be bigger as that where the OS and any installed program files will reside. The more free space the better it should run. If you don't plan on installing many windows programs then you could reverse that so C=30gb and D=50gb. You can then use D to store any data/music/videos/photos and other personal stuff. That way if anything goes wrong with XP you can then reformat C and reinstall XP without losing any data on D.
The drive on my notebook has been done that way but with a dual boot, D contains Linux xubuntu as I still use Linux.
Hope that's of help.
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win32 requires LBA to make partitions over 4GB.
Also switching between Linux and Win patition jourals requires watching whether the bios is in LBA or normal mode.
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The main reason that earlier versions of win32 were limited to 4GB partitions was because they only used 32bit addresses.
The original ATA CHS (Cylinder, Head & Sector) scheme allowed for 1024 Cylinders, 16 Heads and 63 Sectors. However, to increase HDD capacity it obviously made sense to increase the recording density per unit area, by improved coatings, rather than increase the recording area by increasing the number of platters and r/w heads, which increases mechanical complexity and cost. This meant that the cylinder and sector specifications soon became limiting factors whilst the max head count was rarely reached.
The solution was to virtualise the HDD head count, as presented to the OS by the BIOS. A HDD with more than 1024 cylinders could be fully utilised by pretending that the extra cylinders were on a virtual platter, which was read by virtual heads, keeping within the original ATA 1024 cylinder specs.
LBA really just extended the virtual head count limit from 16 to 255 so that even higher recording densities and fewer platters could be used.
It is largely because the main improvement in HDD technology has been in the surface coatings, along with the head technology to read and write at the increased densities, rather than by increasing the platter and head count, that has kept HDD prices relatively constant over the last decade or so; it costs relatively little to use improved coatings and heads when just about everything else about the drive is the same.
None of the native Windows filesystems have ever been journalised and the BIOS will present the same HDD geometry to what ever OS is being run.
Recent BIOS developments have led to the point where the BIOS can run applications without booting the full OS, whilst allowing the OS proper, when it is running, to replace some of the BIOS low-level h/w handlers; the distinction between the two are becoming blurred.
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I have a new problem, drive D is said to have no space. Next time I will try 50, 30 or something else. Thanks.
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You do realise that when you do an install or re-install in MS-windows that the extra drives are not re-partitioned, so they contain original data.
It's only a risk the data could be damaged, and programs to C:\ are unlinked and require -re-installation to properly or safely operate.
You need to look-up
FDISK
or
CFDISK
on the net to comprehend some of that.
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Right click My Computer then Go Manage, then find the Hard Disk setups right click on D and Format it or resize it or what ever.
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If I want to format it, XP has the tool? And Can I partition it for Linux with 11 Gigabytes? Which partition is right for Linux, FAT 32 or NFTP?
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Defrag would solve the case, other wise find out where the hidden stash of porn is and delete that.
You can format your drive D (If you installed to your drive C) by right clicking on drive D and going to 'format' while in my computer.
Other wise in order to format drive C you'll have to do it either through dos (not recommended) or do it through the installation program.
Though, I am not sure whats good for Linux :) Probably FAT 32 but I'm not an expert. But for large disk spaces your safer using NTFS
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You can create a partition for Linux but you won't be able to format it for Linux use from windows.
Both FAT and NTFS filesystems can be read by Linux, but FAT isn't sophisticated enough to run linux upon as it doesn't support all the file attributes needed for a secure filesystem. I believe that NTFS does support the file attributes needed for Linux but write support in Linux is very limited.
Linux can run quite happily on a quite a wide range of other filesystems, but when you come to install it I suggest you use the 'ext3' format. This is backwards compatible with ext2 but includes journalising, which is A Good Thing.
You will actually need two partitions to run Linux: one for the system itself and the other for swap space (page file). Allow 1Gb for the swap partition. 10Gb will certainly cope with a typical Linux installation, but it won't leave much left for data storage. You will be able to write new data to your FAT formatted Windows drives but not to NTFS ones: afaik, NTFS writes in Linux are limited to writing to existing files where the size of the file is not changed.
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Can I change a XP partition size, make c bigger?