Hi, Steve.

Back in 1999 I bought a new computer and the biggest hard disk available
was 8 Gig.

Me, too. And that's about when I started multi-partitioning. I was still
running Win95 when I bought my son a student software bundle that included
WinNT4.0. With much work and experimentation, I learned how to install NT
and dual-boot it with Win95. But NT could not read FAT32, and Win95
couldn't handle NTFS. Both could use FAT(16) partitions, but those could
not be bigger than 2 GB. My new IBM HDD was 9 GB - theoretically - but
after converting sectors, tracks, cylinders, etc., and translating hex to
decimal numbers, there were 4 partitions of 2 GB each, plus about 800 MB
left over. I first created a small primary partition with that 800 MB,
formatted it FAT(16), marked it Active and made it my System Partition.
Then I made an Extended Partition holding 8 GB and created four 2 GB logical
drives in it. The System Partition was Drive C:, Win95's Boot Volume was
Drive D:, Drive E: became Data, Drive F: was for Miscellaneous and Drive G:
was Archives. WinNT's Boot Volume shared the FAT Drive C: with the startup
files, including Boot.ini.

There have been MANY changes over the 15 or so years since then, both in my
hardware and software AND in the capabilities of Windows versions. Each new
HDD was much larger than the one before, and since I had already learned
about Disk Management and partitioning, rather than discard the outgrown
HDD, I just bought a longer cable and added the new disk. (At the moment, I
have 4 internal SATA drives, 200 GB to 1 TB each), 1 external 3 TB USB 3.0,
plus a 180 GB SSD. No, I don't need all that space, but I have it so...
g) In 2002, MSFT gave me the MVP Award and invited me to participate in
the beta for Longhorn, which became Vista.

We went through more than a half-dozen successive builds of the OS beta;
each required us to install the new version from scratch, into a separate
partition, and each came in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. By changing
Boot.ini, we could specify which Disk(#) and Partition(#) to install each
OS. Windows did not require "drive" letters, but we humans are not comfy
without them, so I had pretty soon used up almost all the 26 letters
available. That's when I learned to also assign LABELS to each partition,
so that Vista32 remained Vista32 even when it moved from Drive V: to Drive
X: and its Boot Folder became X:\Windows. At one time, I was
"octo-booting": Boot.ini offered me the choice of 8 versions of Windows
XP/Vista/32/64/NT at each reboot! Thankfully, I'm down to a couple of
choices now and seldom boot anything other than 64-bit Win8.

But THAT was a productive use of multiple partitions. SOME of my data had
to be migrated each time a new OS was installed, but most of the time, only
the current Boot Volume needed to be deleted and recreated to install the
new OS, while all my Data (photos, documents, Quicken records, etc.)
remained untouched on good ol' Drive E:. (Yes, that drive letter has stuck
with me ever since Win95/NT.)

Of course, most of this is of little or no interest to most users, who never
get involved in multiple OSes - but many of us in newsgroups like this DO
get into such adventures. To lump us all together in discussing how, why
and whether to use multiple partitions is to overlook the real world
differences between us.

RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX

Microsoft Windows MVP (2002-2010)
Windows Live Mail 2012 (Build 16.4.3508.0205) in Win8 Pro


"Steve Hayes" wrote in message
...

On Sun, 15 Sep 2013 11:43:39 -0500, Bob I wrote:



On 9/15/2013 11:17 AM, wrote:
I'm, by some quirk (anal retentive, obsessive compulsive, other ???)
of my mentality, an organizational freak. I, by nature, want things well
structured and organized logically.
So, in XP-Pro I have the hard drive partitioned into multiple
partitions _- Office Apps, Internet Apps, Accessories, Utilities,
etc.
I've been told that this "slows" the machine down -- but I don't do
anything (except 1 or 2 CPU-intensive math things I've programmed)
where the slow-down , if it exists, is noticeable.
So, my question --- what's the downside of doing the same thing
on a new Win 7 64 bit computer?



Primarily a waste of time and effort. Makes successful restoration from
backups less likely. All the registry and user info for the
installations remains on the C: drive anyway.

I generally agree but sometimes partitioning makes sense.

Back in 1999 I bought a new computer and the biggest hard disk available was
8
Gig.

When bigger drives became available I got a 40 Gig one, and partioned it
into
D, E, F, and G drives -- back then it was Fat 32, and making it all one
partition would have wasted a bit of space because it would have required a
bigger cluster size. My plan was to use D to back up C, E for programs, F
for
games (I didn't want the kids installing them in my working disk space) and
G
for data.

I installed programs on E because there wasn't enough space on C.

And I've carried the same configuration over ever since, because I don't
like
reinstalling programs -- much too time-consuming.

When I bought a new computer, I bought it without an OS. I just backed up
each
partition on Acronis, and restored it on the new computer's 500 Gig drives.
Everything worked.




--
Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa