Installing in a different partition

[dr_ml422]

I tried the guide by smokey mountain girl and it didn't go right for me. you put some short-cuts in a folder in my documents? I'll post a screenshot of my desktop. don't have much there if you're referring to clutter. itmt if there's another guide to using safe boot just point me there and I'll go and learn it. view details?

[Chewy]

smokies guide is dangerous, forcing safe mode boot is no longer even safe

certain malware infections block a safe mode boot, if you change with msconfig you are screwed

[dr_ml422]

here's my desktop. if there's another guide here or way to learn safe boot then suggest one and I'll give it a go. thnx.

[Chewy]

you just restart your computer and start tapping the f8 key just before the hard drive spins up to boot your OS

listen, watch the screen and even look for the keyboard lights to flash

every computer system is different

[dr_ml422]

you just restart your computer and start tapping the f8 key just before the hard drive spins up to boot your OS

listen, watch the screen and even look for the keyboard lights to flash

every computer system is different

Hi Chewy. I'll get to this soon. At least start off by starting in safe-boot then learn how to run apps. in it. Was getting caught up again doing too much too fast. Keep forgetting to take it easy.

[MilesAhead]

One other proviso

The default installation location of softwares is usually C:\Program Files.
Does installing in a different location/partition have any advantage/disadvantage?

Looking through this thread I see I forgot to mention one gotcha' that I experienced. You only run into it if you have more than one version of Windows installed in a multi-boot setup. Back in the old days when drives were expensive I tried to save some disk space by installing only one copy of applications on a partition that could be seen by both versions of Windows I was booting. Surprisingly, it worked most of the time. You had to install and uninstall on both Windows systems. But some things such as Visual Studio were too clever about which folders were on the system partition and even if you duplicated a configuration in both OS, it never worked right.

Now it seems silly but back then with 3 operating systems installed it seemed worth trying. With cheap disk space now, just duplicate the files. It ain't worth the hassle.

As I see it now, the main advantage of partitioning with just one OS would be quick image backups if you have a loaded disk. If you can keep space utilization below 30% it's prolly simpler just to have one big C:\

[dr_ml422]

you just restart your computer and start tapping the f8 key just before the hard drive spins up to boot your OS

listen, watch the screen and even look for the keyboard lights to flash

every computer system is different

Hi Chewy. Ok I know how to get to safe mode. There's 3 options. Safe mode alone, w/networking and another 1 I can't remember. Now this safe mode is for apps. only correct? I wasn't able to connect to firefox. When I re-installed my windows after my virus it use to not do a normal start-up. I had to click on another setting. Would that be the bios setting that would serve as a safe boot to let any anti-virus proggie to get a head start?

[Chewy]

safe mode with networking when you need help bad

safe mode command prompt when your computer is really hosed and you know all those commands(I don't)

normal safe mode just to fix things like remove a bad driver from add/remove or device manager

[dr_ml422]

Ok i got it. Now is it recommended to not start in normal start up but rather in the other way I couldn't explain? I know it wasn't safe mode because my screen is black in safe mode.

[Chewy]

safe mode with vga?

not sure what that's for at all?

[dr_ml422]

safe mode with vga?

not sure what that's for at all?

Instead of the regular normal start-up it would go to something like a bios screen and ask me to click on a command or hit a function key to then load the regular windows w/my desktop screen. Think I had to go to bios to change it. It was just a lil delay until my anti-virus would kick in I guess. Don't know. It was the way the Dell tech left it when they helped me do a clean re-install.

[dr_ml422]

Did some googling on this different partition install. Different views from different forums. Seems really no biggie but rather better when it comes to defragging if you have your os in a different partition than your apps. data could go elsewhere also. makes sense just in case 1 gets infected and not the other. don't know how quickly a virus or spyware and malicious ware can spread from 1 place to another but might not be a bad idea anyway to keep things separate.

Missed your post above> the advantage is being able to keep your system partition defragged in a more timely fashion

[MilesAhead]

Also in the "old days" before cheap drive imaging backup software just having your OS on the system partition meant that if you could back up the registry, then if that partition got hosed you could just reinstall the OS, then restore the registry, and a lot of apps would probably work. Now with the backup imaging utilities it may be faster just to do the image restore. Depends how much stuff you are carrying. If you like a zillion little programs it may still be a good idea to partition but it may be better to use a separate physical drive. As a general rule you tend to get thrashing if your OS is on C:\ and the disk head has to keep going over to G:\ to load exe files and data. Thing to do is a few skeleton setups(esp if you're on a spare PC that you can afford to mess with) and see how it feels with each kind of setup.

Multiple drive isn't always faster. I had Linux set up on a machine that had a SCSI drive,
then when I added an ATAPI 2.6 GB HD I tried out the "round robin" swap capability in Linux. Turns out the new drive was so much faster than the original that using the old SCSI swap partition exclusively was slow. But using a swap on the SCSI "round robin" with a swap partition on the new drive, reduced thrashing on the new HD although any other performance difference wasn't detectable by just using the system. It ran quieter!

[dr_ml422]

I have 2 hd's from seagate on my new build. 1 is 250gb and the other is 500gb. My os is on 50gb of the 250. the rest is partitioned. my 500gb is intact. The only thing I put on the 200 or less partitioned hd is quicktime alternative. yet to use it. i noticed that saving my video files as .iso's on my 500gb was way better than what i use to do on my dell which at 1 point was partitioned into 2 drives of 40gb each and then just 1 complete 80gb. I had about 200 or so gb of video work on my 500gb hd. I didn't defrag once since I built my pc until the other day. the drive w/the os was virtually clean and defragmented lovely. I do have my apps. on there also. the 500gb after deleting all my video work went through w/out a glitch and didn't even need defragging. now I only just read about swap files on the net and here now. Don't know if they're created on their own or w/e. Probably can be expanded. Bottom line I was pleased to have data in a different drive. Mind you I do have a very good build now. So, the thrashing I presume is most likely limited to apps. on a partition on the same hd as the os? In other words if my apps. were on the 200gb partition and my os on the 50gb one but on the same drive, thrashing would occur if I had many apps. in the 200gb partition?

Just some clarification or different views or suggestions are greatly appreciated as always. Thnx.

[MilesAhead]

Raid not being in the picture, the ideal would be separate physical hard drives for OS and/or executables, data, and swap. Or if you have enough ram to run with no swap then you'd only need 2 physical drives. Or I guess if you had time to do analysis you could try stuff like putting an OS partition between other partitions so that thrashing is reduced by having the apps that run together on one side of the OS or the other but not spanning it. I'm sure there's more than one way to optimize.

I haven't really delved into the nitty-gritty of Raid setups so I can't advise you there.

One of the few "advantages" of a really slow PC was that when you optimized it, you could feel and hear and see the difference. Didn't need to run benchmarks if the disk light flickered half as much and programs loaded obviously faster. Maybe there's a simulator to slow your PC down? Like the "Sloppy" proxy software that lets you know how your website reacts when accessed via dial-up instead of broadband? It wouldn't surprise me.

But there are a lot of variables. Experimentation would probably produce better results than my conjecture.