[RESOLVED] partioning and the drive that will be known as "C:" to windows

[Angry Black Man]

i want to take a 80 gig disk (more or less) and partition it as such:

first partition: 1 gig
second partition: 79 gig

is it possible to make the first partition unrecognizable so that when i install windows to the 79gig partition, that partition will become the C drive? i dont have the drive on hand to just try it, so im wondering in the meantime?

ive seen people install to the partition that isnt the first on the disk, and windows has no problem installing to "D:", but things tend to get stupid from there.

[scragar]

you could install it then repartition it.

Windows has a big phobia about being installed on a partition that's not the whole drive(atleast vista and XP do :()

[felgall]

Each hard drive can be divided into four primary partitions or three primary partitions and one extended partition.

Windows can only see one primary partition and the one it sees on the first drive will be the one it uses as C:

Any additional partitions you want windows to see on that drive need to be created as logical partitions within the extended partition.

A custom install of Windows should allow you to select which primary partition you want to install it into. Alternatively using partition management software may allow you to select the appropriate partition and make it the visible one prior to starting the install.

[bathurst_guy]

then even in disk management (right click my computer, manage, disk management) you can right click on the partitions and associate a different drive letter to it, so simply change D to C.

[\\.\]

You need a MINIMUM of 4 Gigs for XP as an install and drive that has your swap drives (Disk Memory). Having built and installed XP many times you will find your creating problems by using a partition less than 4 Gigs.

If you need to change the size of a partition, your best off using Acronis Partition Manager, it will cost you but then it will provide you with a reliable way of doing the job. If it asks, make the recovery suite of disks as it like all software can encounter problems with the hardware as I found on one Hard disk and wrecked a perfectly good legal copy of a Microsoft operating system.

If its a fresh drive then you can create the partitions during the install process without the need of extra software.

[Angry Black Man]

allow me to give you expanded information on this issue. however, understand that this is an explantion of what i want to do, and not a debate on whether it is the most optimal solution or wether there are any other workarounds.

i want to try and optimize my laptop's performace as it pertains (and only pertains) to the paging file. my understanding is that it is obviously better to have the page file on a different disk for the most optimal performance as that disk will naturally have separate hardware to do that reading.

since i cant do that, i decided that i could improve read performance by ensuring the page file is as close to the center of the disk as humanly possible. i may decided to change the default allocation table as well so that there are less sectors to read, but that can be messed with as i go along.

if i have an 80gig disk, and i partition it with a 1g partition, as well as a 79 gig partition, the first partition i expect will be created at the center of the disk. then the rest will fill up the rest.

then, i wan to install windows to the 79gig parition, but i want windows to recognize it as the C drive (because you should never change (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/223188) the drive letter of the system partition), but i didnt know if it would make it the "D" drive since it isnt the first partition on the disk.

so i was essentially just wondering if anyone had any experience with drive lettering when you have unformatted partitions that precede the windows partition.

as far as installing first and then repartitioning, i dont want the partition's physical location on the disk to be arbitrary. i want it close to the center, and it couldnt happen if there was data already there (the installation of windows)

on another topic, where did this come from:

You need a MINIMUM of 4 Gigs for XP as an install and drive that has your swap drives (Disk Memory). Having built and installed XP many times you will find your creating problems by using a partition less than 4 Gigs.

i never even alluded to this?

[\\.\]

It does not matter the drive letter of the windows install, I have 2 machines that have windows on drive D: what does matter is poor program coding where programmers "Assume" that the install will wither be in C:\Windows; c:\WINNT; or similar folder on C:\

Having done this many times in Network admin, finding that the install process on Drives <4Gigs posed a problem with the install failing, it was recommended by the instructor that any drive that you install to should be at least 4 Gigs with no additional components being installed or for install of OS use a 6Gig partition.

That's where that came from, practical exercise on a MCP course I did a couple of years ago.

We had a 16 x 4 hour lessons, each lesson we had to build a computer from scratch, install the OS, configure it either as a PDC, BDC or as an Active Directory depending on the OS and network requirements.

[Angry Black Man]

It does not matter the drive letter of the windows install

that is a fairly true statement, but even you alluded to the fact that it can create a problem. regardless of the fact that it is (arguably) not MS's fault, it is 1000x better to ensure your windows is on the C drive. it will save you unecessary troubleshooting and heartache

Having done this many times in Network admin, finding that the install process on Drives <4Gigs posed a problem with the install failing

you misunderstand me. im not asking about the validity of your statement, im asking why did you come out of left field with that information considering it has entirely no bearing on the question at hand. i made no allusions to installing to a drive less than 4 gigs in size, and therefore your information is completely unecessary to the topic at hand.

[\\.\]

So what is the 1gig partition for? a partition is like a drive, follows the same rules as a drive so if your partition is <4gigs its the same as having a HDD <4gigs regardless of the actual drive size you have, in your case 80gig.

[EricG1793]

Back when I was trying to save our old computer (I know I've posted the big story somewhere, but I'll just get to the part of it that has to do with this topic) I had to get rid of Win. XP and revert back to Win. 98 SE. So, I went with the Win. 98 startup disc, and I deleted the C: partition, that XP was on. Then I started off fresh with a (basically, theoretically) completely blank hard drive. Then I fresh-installed 98 SE on on one big partition taking up the whole drive's capacity... So maybe you can delete both partitions on the hard drive, and then reinstall XP and have the partition be C: and take up the maximum space the hard drive is allowed?

The benefits of this are:

1) Save hassle of fumbling with trying to re-name partitions

2) Save hassle of programs wanting to install to C when they can only install to D

3) You're using the whole hard drive with one clean partition, so you don't have a dead partition hanging around in there.

4) And of course, you get a completely clean XP installation.

The only problems are how to delete the partitions, and installing XP to a blank drive, but I'm sure these problems are very easily worked around; I just haven't had experience with doing that with XP.

[Angry Black Man]

the 1 gig partition is where i will place the paging file. that way, it is close to the center of the disk (faster read time to the page file in nanoseconds), and also, i want it to have its own partition to reduce fragmentation.

essentially, i want it to look like this:

- blank disk
- parition the disk.
-- first partition: ~1gig
-- second partition: the rest
- format the second partition
- install windows
- (i hope and expect the drive to be recognized by windows as the C drive, despite there being a parition -- unformatted -- that precedes the windows partition)
- format the ~1gig partition, which will become the D (or whatever is available) drive
- move the paging file to the newly formatted partition
- C drive is on second partition (physically), but is on the primary partition (logically)

[felgall]

It does not matter the drive letter of the windows install, I have 2 machines that have windows on drive D: what does matter is poor program coding where programmers "Assume" that the install will wither be in C:\Windows; c:\WINNT; or similar folder on C:\

No matter what drive you put the windows folder on, there are certain windows files that MUST be in the root folder of the C: drive for windows to work.

[\\.\]

the 1 gig partition is where i will place the paging file. that way, it is close to the center of the disk (faster read time to the page file in nanoseconds), and also, i want it to have its own partition to reduce fragmentation.

essentially, i want it to look like this:

- blank disk
- parition the disk.
-- first partition: ~1gig
-- second partition: the rest
- format the second partition
- install windows
- (i hope and expect the drive to be recognized by windows as the C drive, despite there being a parition -- unformatted -- that precedes the windows partition)
- format the ~1gig partition, which will become the D (or whatever is available) drive
- move the paging file to the newly formatted partition
- C drive is on second partition (physically), but is on the primary partition (logically)
Way I was told is best for a disk is to partition the drive so that the first part, eg 100Megs is RAW, unused which should be near the spindle, this is supposed to give the heads a bit of buffer room so stop them potentially smacking into the spindle, then create your "Blank" disc and each disk having a small amount of gap as RAW space which I was told will be used as swap bits where you get failures in the surface over time, an average of 100MB should be ample, then create another drive and repeat until you have the desired set up and have similar buffer zone on the outer edge of the disk.

This is roughly how I partition my drives and I have had them a fair few years, my partner likes to use the whole available space and I believe this is why she has gone through 4 drives in as many years... Over time they get fragmented and begin to make nasty popping & clicking sounds and she wonders why they give up, I have more response from a brick wall...

[\\.\]

No matter what drive you put the windows folder on, there are certain windows files that MUST be in the root folder of the C: drive for windows to work.
I know, these will be Track 0 which holds the Boot sector, this incidentally should be backed up as a matter of security so a restore of Track 0 is possible, I have only ever had a boot sector virus wipe Track 0 and I was luck to have a usable back up.

Your HDD manufacturer should have a suite of tools that will do this for you.

[Angry Black Man]

partition the drive so that the first part, eg 100Megs is RAW

thats an interesting premise. got a good tech read about that? the theory seems pretty sound.

[\\.\]

Only what I was taught in the course I took a couple of years ago.

Windows will mark the first 8MB of any drive as un-usable, that you will see when using the M$ installer on a fresh drive.

The misses has managed to thrash several drives to death, I managed to set up her boot drive through partition magic with those settings without her knowing but other than that, she insists on having all the drive available and is the main reason why she gets through as many drives as she does.

[Angry Black Man]

Only what I was taught in the course I took a couple of years ago.

meh

[Angry Black Man]

you know, in all the posts in this thread, there was never a direct answer to my question. i finally got my hard drive, and went to work to answer the question that went unanswered: can this be done?

the first problem i ran into immediately is that when you create a partition, it automatically assigned a drive letter to it. that was a problem considering i wanted the first partition to not grab the 'C' designation, which it did. see attachment 1. if i created the second partition and then deleted the first, it would still have the 'D' designation.

i racked my brain for ways to cheat the process-- using a USB device to recognize the drive on another computer, and using the disk manager to create two partitions, and then magically forcing the second partition on the drive to be the 'C' drive. This, of course, presented the problem that if the drive was on another computer, i couldn't give it the 'C' letter since the computer it was on already had a 'C' drive.

if i simply created the first partition, leaving it as 'C', and then created the second partition, leaving it as 'D' and then installed to 'D' only, i ended up with what i asked for-- a windows partition with a designation of 'D'.

so finally, i devised a plan to get what i wanted. i created the first partition. then i created a second partition of only 8 megs. then i deleted the first partition. this would free up the drive letter 'C'. after that, i created the 3rd partition, which then received the 'C' designation. however, it complained that it had to write information to the first partition since it was inherently the boot partition, but that it was not formatted properly. see attachment 2 and 3 respectively. finally, i re-partitioned the first instance of unallocated space, and received the proper designations. see attachment 4. when actually installing to the large partition, it had to first format the boot partition, and upon completion, it formats the system partition.

in the end, this setup resulted in my original need. and more importantly, when i moved the paging file to the boot partition, the paging file was one contiguous file, which of course eliminates fragmentation in the page file. see figure 5.

the only problem i ran into afterwards was the page file drive causing windows to complain about low disk space. i had to use a registry "tweak" to prevent the notification. i then hid the existence of my page file drive using the windows tweakui utility. and what's more, i found that i could have suppressed the low disk space notification through the tweakui program.

so now theres some useful, accurate, and most importantly, relevant information in this thread. hope it helps someone in the future.