Is it wise to partition a 160GB drive on a Thinkpad T61 machine

[azeem]

Hello All,

I recently bought a Thinkpad T61 160GB Hard Disk Drive, 5400rpm.

I would like to partition the 160gb drive into two more drives.

How do I go about it. Will the partition wipe off the Rescue and recovery options that come with the blue thinkvantage button on the laptop.

[tfflivemb2]

Welcome to the forum!

If you use a third party program like Partition Magic, you can shift the partitions and create a new one.  Is there a reason that you want to create an additional partition?

[mbhockey13]

 I have a 160GB hard drive on my T61, and I have four partitions:

C: Windows XP Pro
D: Page FIle (nothing but a page file)
E: Documents
G: Windows Vista Business x64

It's no big deal to partition - I like having the page file on its own partition, and I share the Documents partition with both XP and Vista. Plus, if I ever have to reinstall the OS on either I don't have to affect the documents.

Good luck!

[Julie]

mbhockey13,

That is a brilliant set-up - WOW!

Do you mind if I copy you?

What space allocation do you have for each partition?

What button do you push at start up to access the various partitions?

What partition software did you use?

Thanks so much for posting that!

[icantux]

Definitely partition the drive. There's less of a chance of critical data loss in a system's failure event. By keeping the OS on one partition and data on a different partition, you can rest assured that your data will remain secure in case you need to reformat and re-install your operating system (should something go terribly wrong).  You could partition it 2 or three ways, depending on your needs etc. Either in Vista or XP, change the location of the "Documents or My Documents" to a separate partition.

I wouldn't go as far as creating separate partitions for the virtual memory (swap drive) like mbhockey did, because it's rather useless on a 1 disk system. Putting a paging file (swap drive) on a separate physical drive will yield significantly better results "swapping" than placing the paging file on the same physical drive (no matter that it's on a different partition). Placing a dedicated swap file in its own partition (even if on the same physical drive) is more pertinent to unix-based systems than dos/windows based systems. There's plenty of info and reasons for this explained on various sites. Additionally, if you have more than 3GB RAM, you can do without any paging file altogether without experiencing performance loss (in fact, you'd probably notice a performance gain!).

Cheers




Message Edited by icantux on 04-13-2008 06:54 PM

[mbhockey13]

Thanks Julie!

I didn't use any partitioning software, though I do have Partition Magic. I just set three of the four partitions when doing the first fresh install of Windows XP SP2 (with Compatiability Mode set in the BIOS - you set it back after installing XP and the Intel SATA driver), and then I installed Vista after on the remaining free space, and Vista sets up the Master Boot Record to give you choice of Vista or earlier Windows version (which unfortunately, as far as I see, cannot be easily renamed).

There ARE advantages to having the Page File on a seperate partition, even on the same physical drive. Most notably, if the page file size minimum and maximum are set to the same size of the partition, the file can never be fragmented. It has worked real well with our setups here. As an experiment, I even set XP and Vista to use the SAME partition (Drive "D:\") and pagefile.sys, and have had no negative effects. I leave a VERY small page file on each Windows drive (2 MB on XP, 16 MB on Vista 64), but otherwise, it's all on the D: drive.

My drive sizes (roughly):

C:\  XP  80 GB
D:\  PageFile  5 GB
E:\  Documents  35 GB
G:\  Vista Bus x64  40GB

My PageFile partition is so large because I have 4 GB of RAM, plus that 1 GB of "Turbo" memory, which I'm starting to agree with Sony and HP that it does nothing in Vista - at least not what it says it's supposed to do.

Hope this helps!

[Julie]

That is brilliant!

Thank you so very much!

[azeem]

Thanks a lot for every reply !

This is my first laptop ever so I am not really conversant in the laptop config jargon.

So what I understand from the replies is that I can partition the drive and I would not lose the "Rescue and Recovery" functionality (Blue Thinkvantage button on the laptop keyboard).

And tfflivemb2 I would like to partition the drive because I only have C: \ right now. So I would like to have program files in one drive and my data in another drive. Does that make sense.

 And although my specs show 160 GB HD space but this C:\ drive shows total space as 146 GB.

My guess from reading forum posts is that there is another drive(Hidden) which is taking up the rest of the space.

This hidden drive is responsible for the "Rescue and Recovery" .

I never tried disk partitioning before.

So is it safe to say that IF while partitioning the drive (C:\) I am required to format the C:\ drive, I am still good and would still be able to get back to factory settings by simply pressing the blue think vantage button.

[icantux]

azeem,

You could partition your drive without installing anything and without having to recover anything and do all this very easily using SystemRescueCD. Just google that for more information on how to use it. It's a linux utility. Works very well and.  You boot your system from the cd and then you can partition the drive without every having to install/uninstall anything at all. Best of all, it's a free utility.

When you boot from this CD and get to the partitioning part, you'll note two partitions. One large one (that's the "preload", i.e. c: which contains windows) and another smaller partition. Never touch the smaller partition, that's the one that contains the R&R for your system.

 A good source for Thinkpads is ThinkWiki for this kind of a job. Just follow the procedure on shrinking the main drive and then just disregard the rest (about installing linux). http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Pre-Installation_steps

Here's a link to SystemRescueCD: http://www.sysresccd.org/

Regardless, I'd suggest you do some research on partitioning before venturing into this process.... and for goodness sake - make a backup of all your important information before starting anything - particularly if this is your first time doing something like this.

I carry SystemRescueCD on a USB stick (128MB) - great little tool to have when you need to do some quick maintenance on a system (like partitioning/repartitioning).

Cheers


Message Edited by icantux on 04-14-2008 10:30 AM

[SirDankus]

In regards to having a seperate partition for a page file, it is not necessary even for the sake of avoiding fragmentation.

If you set the maximum and minimum size of the page file to the same number, it will never change size, and thus won't become fragmented.  In fact, page file fragmentation is actually not even much of a problem nowadays, since computers now have more than enough RAM that they rarely touch the page file for something that would reduce performance.

It's also not necessary to assign a significantly large size for the page file these days.  For some reason Microsoft recommends an amount that's a multiple of your physical RAM, which I think was applicable back in the day when computers had below 1GB of RAM.

1-2GB is about all you need for a page file, these days.