Transfering again

[tony draper]

back again chaps.:(
Right the situation is thus,neighbors new machine is working fine with new 500gig Hard Disk,plonk in old hard disk as slave,transfer documents setting for the four individual users from old to new,seems to be fine then chaos ensues,well according to them,not seen it meself yet,
Two questions if I may,is it possible to have the operating system on the master C: disk and have any the stuff you do ie downloads document stored on the D:? as you would have with a 500gig HD partitioned ie the operating system on one partition and your work ie docs ect on the second partition
The other question?
Second question,I have Partition Magic on a disk somewhere,never used it as such had a glance at it once not even sure where I got it from now,this I assume is what one uses to create two partitions on a large hard disk,if I do partition this disk what size partition would I need for windows XP pro and possible upgrade to win 7 in the future.
The other possible problem this version of Partition magic will probably be a bit long in the tooth,would the early versions cope with a disk of 500 gigabyte size.
As per greatfull for any help

[Bushfiva]

You can have the OS on one drive and data on another drive, no problem. There are tools that will move the special folders (e.g. My Documents, My Pictures, etc.) to wherever you want them to be. For example, Tweak UI can do this. Many people prefer to have their data well away from the OS.

Partition Magic is long discontinued. The free Easeus is almost identical. Again, there are many tools that will let you create and adjust partitions. The operating system can also (usually) create partitions, but often not with the flexibility or ease of a third-party tool.

Re partition size, you can get XP and Win 7 into 5GB to 10GB, I'd guess, but you need to consider the size of the swap file unless you've got the gumption to move it somewhere else. Also, even if you religiously install applications to a different partition, a lot of cruft still gets added to the system folders over time. Personally, I'd probably use 30GB for the boot partition since drive space is really cheap. In reality, I've got a 1TB boot drive and two 2TB data drives on one of my machines, mainly because I couldn't be bothered to buy anything smaller.

[Mike-Bracknell]

Frankly, i've given up with partitioning hard drives for desktop/laptops, as the end user hits disk space issues on the C drive at least 10 times more often than they have the other issues that disk partitioning is supposed to solve (which are greatly reduced with newer OS's and filesystems anyway).

Do it on a server, for good reasons, but don't bother on a desktop/laptop which should by rights be considered expendable with all your essential data saved elsewhere like a NAS, server or internet storage.

[tony draper]

Thanks chaps,not going to bother with partitioning,just gonna do it the way I always have.
:)

[BOAC]

TD - if you intend to install W7 AND keep XP as well, you will need to partition your drive and install the new OS in a different partition to XP. As bf says, 30gb for each would do for starters - difficult to comment on P Magic since you do not say which version, but again as BF says, Easeus is a good tool. Partitioning is very straightforward with the modern software and makes backing up routine stuff easier.