In a dual boot situation, are multi hard drives or partitioning necessary

[guyfromky]

What are your thoughts on this topic. If a PC user wants to run Win 98, ME, or, 2K alongside XP, could it be done on one 80gig/7200rpm/non-partitioned hard drive?

Would it suit the DAW better if there were partitions or a second hard drive added?

Thanks for the comments!!!

guyfromky

[Pako]

Historically speaking, you would need a different drive, or logical DOS partition for each operating system.

Installing a newer OS into the same partition as a old OS will result in a UPGRADE of the old system.

XP has a Dual-Boot function built into it that lets you install XP's OS into a different partition/Hard Drive for a dual boot configuration. Those configs can be found in the boot.ini file.

If your looking for more than two OS's, I Would look into some multi-boot software. There's several names on the market that will do this for you. www.vcom.com (http://www.vcom.com) 's System Command is one of them.

I have found that using XP's boot process for dual booting into ME and XP provides me with faster and arguable better stability than using System Commander.

I hope this helps ya...

~Cheers~

[Mark_Knecht]

Hi,
80GB is fine, but you must create different partitions for each OS. (Not for data though.)

I create a fairly small partition for each OS, on the order of 2 GB, but smaller is probably fine. I then create a large partition for my data files - pictures, music, work, whatever and generally my programs. That way, no matter which OS I'm in, my data can allways be accessed. Program will usually only work from the OS they were installed in due to registry entries being missing.

This is just my way of doing it. I bet matt and/or da BaSsTaRd will have some other ideas on how to do this.

Cheers,
Mark

Originally posted by guyfromky:
What are your thoughts on this topic. If a PC user wants to run Win 98, ME, or, 2K alongside XP, could it be done on one 80gig/7200rpm/non-partitioned hard drive?

Would it suit the DAW better if there were partitions or a second hard drive added?

Thanks for the comments!!!

guyfromky<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">

[da BaSsTaRd!]

Originally posted by Mark_Knecht:
I bet matt and/or da BaSsTaRd will have some other ideas on how to do this.<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">sure... this weekend i installed xp for the first time. it rocks. i set it up to dual boot. that's the first time i did it and it worked like a charm. no hangups or anything.

my master disk had 2 partitions (4GB win98 and 25GB that i use to archive sessions). i split the big one and created another 4GB partition for XP using partition magic. then i installed XP and XP figured out on its own that i needed to dual boot. it couldn't have been easier. by the way, mark's advice about 2GB for the OS is good. the only reason i have 4GB is because sometimes i like to install games and other junk and then ghost C: when i'm done with them.

it makes for good housekeeping to have a second drive partitioned for audio. i have 2 audio drives (one is firewire). each is split into 2 partitions. the first partition on each drive is for audio sessions. there are a few good reasons for this.

the first partition is the outside of the disk. the outside partition rotates faster than the inside. this reduces controller overhead and seek time.

10-20GB is big enough for several sessions yet small enough to keep the defrag time down. it takes 40 days and 40 nights to defrag 80GB! maintenance takes time.

i'm gonna keep my win98 setup for a while. lets see how this PTLEXP works out first....

[westlake]

Say....how do you manage to have 10-20GB partitions on your audio drive and still have 32kb cluster size? Whenever I try it, the partition always ends up with 16kb cluster size (which actually seems to give me more trax on the davec test, though...)

[QuikDraw]

Originally posted by guyfromky:
If a PC user wants to run Win 98, ME, or, 2K alongside XP, could it be done on one 80gig/7200rpm/non-partitioned hard drive?

Would it suit the DAW better if there were partitions or a second hard drive added?
<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">I have a single drive for my two OSes and a separate physical drive for my audio. My system drive is a 40GB split into 3 partitons. WinME is on a 8GB partition. WinXP is on a 14GB partition. Both are primary partitions managed by Power Quest Boot Magic. The third partition is my "backup" partition of 18GB. All the drivers and patches and everything I've ever downloaded for running a PC are on that partition. When I image either of my OS partitions I store the image on the backup partition. I also burn the image to CD-R as well in case the whole drive fails.

Using Boot Magic allows me to have the two Windows partitions completely unaware of the existence of the other. As far as my installation of WinXP is concerned it is not a dual boot system. WinXP cannot see the WinME partition that's been hidden by Boot Magic.

That Boot Magic setup just makes me feel more secure. I don't want my 2 Win versions to know about each other! I only want to lose one system at a time. Having WinXP control the dual boot just bugs me.

images/icons/smile.gif

The separate audio drive is a must in my opinion. I could be wrong. I've never tried it with a single hard drive.

Mike

[da BaSsTaRd!]

Originally posted by westlake:
Say....how do you manage to have 10-20GB partitions on your audio drive and still have 32kb cluster size? Whenever I try it, the partition always ends up with 16kb cluster size (which actually seems to give me more trax on the davec test, though...)<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">i use partition magic. just right click on the the partition, go to advanced, choose "change cluster size".

[guyfromky]

WOW! Lots of info here. Thanks so much.

There are some that say partitioning lessens the life expectancy of a hard drive so, it's better to go with seperate drives rather thansplitting one up into sections. Any thoughts??

[Pako]

Hummm...

Well I used to never partition before, then I got System Command 2k and Partitioned a 80gb like such:

20gb - Archive Partition
20gb - Archive Partition
4gb - ME Partition
10gb - Win2K Partition -> Later XP
26gb - Extented Partition - Data/Downloads

I had this drive setup like this just under a year. I wanted to delete a partition and resize the remaining space to one of the archive partitions.

During this process, I had to "move" the archive partition to a different location on the drive, so it would be next to the available space.

During the move, it has to shuffle data accross the partitions. During this process, I got a write error. This write error halted my partition move process, and it corrupted 3 of the 5 partitions. This means I had DATA LOSS over three partitions...

SO I backuped what wasn't corrupted, and proceeded to format the 80gb drive and start all over. I couldn't even do that. The Drive was bad! I sent it in and got a new one.

Now I have just two partitions on it. One 4gb partition for ME and a 76gb for XP. I added a IDE controller that came with another newly purchased 80gb maxtor which I then formated to a NTFS format that I use for all my mass video storage.

I've never had a drive crash like this before...and really have now idea if partitioning it caused the drive to fail, but I do know, I personally won't get carried away with partitioning again. KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) is my moto now when it comes to partitioning...

~Cheers~