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I want to make a Partition for my self Windows XP, Right now im running Windows 98, I have a 80 gig hard drive,
I want to make a Partitioning using 40 gigs for the XP.. IAnd leave another 40 or less for WIN98, I dont know how to use Patition Magic correctly need someone to guide me through cause i dont understand those scroll bars to use on how many MB or whatever it said....
???
i would just leave it all @ FAT32, since winXP allows u 2 either FAT32 or NTFS......
this would allow u 2 use files from ur XP partion in 98 as wel.......
NTFS performs much better that fat32, is more secure than fat32, defrags faster than fat32, is just plain better than fat32. Installing XP to fat32 is just silly and very unsecure.
Why do you want such huge partitions? If you had 15 to 20gig each for the OS's, youd have room to do almost anything you'd normally want to. That would leave you 40 to 50 gig for downloads, archives, music, video, whatever.
Shrink the OS partitions and you can store even more. Make a single smaller fat32 shared partition if you need to share files accross the two OS's.
The larger the OS partitons, the longer it takes to manage. Smaller partitions only need defragging when they are in use a lot or being written to a lot.
The ultimate partition magic is Volume Manager 2.
It's a server grade version of partition magic and has extended partitioning and formatting capabilities. Less errors, and a more thorough format.
Partition Magic is a doddle to use.
The main concern is that you don't screw up your system by trying to dual boot.
Do your homework. Google, read the FAQ's etc. Serious! :ph34r:
The easiest and best solution is to buy another disk and use each disk for a different OS.
The hard way is to dual-boot on a single disk.
You have to be aware of boot code boundaries.
Windows 98 and Windows XP have a boot code boundary of 8Gb.
This means that the bootable partition must begin below the first 8Gb of your physical harddisk.
Therefore you might need :
Primary 4Gb Fat32 Partition (for Windows 98)
Primary 4Gb ntfs Partition (for Win XP)
Primary Extended Partiton = 72Gb.
with the extended partition into several logical partitions ( either Fat32 or NTFS).
Your currrent hard disk has Windows 98 with probably programs installed.
If you try to separate the OS and the programs into separate partitions, then you are going to have to run drive mapper, to make sure the registry entries are correct.
I recommend you buy another hard disk and dual boot with 2 drives.
You can play with Partition Magic afterwards, inserting/deleting/resizing partitions.
You are confused.
You have apparently never done a proper dual boot setup.
Any amount of OS's can in fact be installed on a single hard drive.
All must be installed in the order they were released in. The best configuration is windows 98 on the first partition.
You have this part right, it must be installed on the first partition, or, a partition that begins no higher than the 8gig boundary.
BUT, it can be any size you like.
The second and subsequent OS's can be installed to any partition, any where on the primary or secondary drives.
The additional OS's are booted from the first partition/OS or from the primary boot sector via the NT bootloader so the 8gig barrier does not apply unless you try unwisely to install it as a second primary partition.
All additional OS's should be installed from within the first active operating system, in the windows environment UNLESS you use a third party boot manager. There again, the boot info is kept in the boot sector of the first OS so the location and size of the second OS will not matter.
As long as the order of release is used to determine which OS to install next, it will not matter if they are not installed sequentially to the drives.
Two identical or near identical OS's will present problems however with crosslinking of files. This can be partially solved by renaming the default installation folder from "windows" to some other unique name for each install.
I also did not suggest installing the system files and programs to separate partitons. There are cases where this is advisable but in most cases, it's more trouble than it's worth.
what I did say was that all archivable files and folders should be kept out of the system as much as possible.
There is no need to have the system actively managing 50 gigs of stored music, videos, downloads, documents, etc.
Those files will remain untouched for longer periods of time and in most cases will be read only when needed or called. An occasional defrag is all that is needed to manage those files.
This is just not true.Quote:
The easiest and best solution is to buy another disk and use each disk for a different OS
The best solution is in fact to have all OS's on one drive so only one will be used at any given time. A second drive could then be used for archived files, to provide even faster access to those files without affecting the operating system performance.
Take server configuration as a good example if you really want to understand a performance system.
In almost all cases, you would have nothing but the OS on the primary drive. Any calls for data then access the storage drives allowing for faster multiple accesses without one drive having to do all the work.
After your reply, I checked around and found this useful page about multibooting.
You were right and I was confused. My confusion was that I knew about the boot code boundaries, and that you could only have one visible bootable partition at a time. Ergo, (according to my thinking), to allow for the choice of OS, the bootable (primary) partions had to start below their boot code boundaries. The error was trying to have more than one primary partition.
My current system is Windows Xp and Linux on one drive, Windows ME (for the pinball) on another drive. I can probably do it better. :D
I was always brought up with the mantra to keep it simple, unlike the idea of mixing multiple OS's on a single physical drive .
Is is quite an interesting idea what you suggest.
Thanks.
Not a bad article but I'm not impressed with the use of fat 16. A Huge waste of the hard drive and system performance. Surprisingly, the article is dated September 10, 2001 . I would have guessed it was written around windows 95 if not for the refference to 2k and XP. Maybe just badly edited from an earlier post ?
Download Partition Magic 8, and create a 50mb Fat16 partition. Install BootMagic on it. Setup a five gig Fat32 partition for W98, a seven and a half gig NTFS partition for XP, and then setup a 15 gig partition to hold programs. Use something like TweakXP to shift your program files directory on W98 to the 15gigger, and do the same for XP. If you feel better doing so, make two folders, Program Files 1 and 2... The rest of the space is for file-sharing :)
I just found this article and thought it might also be helpful.
www.dougknox.com