If anybody knows anything about hard drive partitions...

penguinofwar · 12-29-2011, 10:00 PM

Okay so, basically I just got a new laptop. It has a partition of about 60 gigs for the OS and then the rest of the hard drive is about 400 gigs. I started downloading some games onto my computer, and I realized that it was saving everything onto the partition, which is filling up pretty fast. The 60 gig partition also appears to be my default hard drive partition, so anything that I save (My documents and etc.) is going to be saved under that partition. I was wondering if anybody knew anyway that I could fix that so my default drive was the larger partition and so that I could basically seperate my OS partition from everything else. If it helps, I've got Windows 7.

dtaylorl · 12-29-2011, 10:16 PM

When you install a program you can choose which drive you want to install to, just make sure you choose the appropriate one. You can change your My Documents, etc. by creating the same folders on your storage drive, and then selecting your Documents library in Windows Explorer. Where it says Includes: 1 location, click 1 location, and then you can choose what the default location is for your documents folder, remove the old location and add the one you created on your storage partition. Same thing for your Music, Videos, Pictures, etc. folders. Hopefully that all makes sense. I have a similar setup on my laptop and it works quite well. So long as a program isn't too big I will still install it on the OS partition, but anything else gets kept on the storage partition.

***BillSPrestonEsq*** · 12-29-2011, 10:22 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by penguinofwar

Okay so, basically I just got a new laptop. It has a partition of about 60 gigs for the OS and then the rest of the hard drive is about 400 gigs. I started downloading some games onto my computer, and I realized that it was saving everything onto the partition, which is filling up pretty fast. The 60 gig partition also appears to be my default hard drive partition, so anything that I save (My documents and etc.) is going to be saved under that partition. I was wondering if anybody knew anyway that I could fix that so my default drive was the larger partition and so that I could basically seperate my OS partition from everything else. If it helps, I've got Windows 7.

You can likely change the partition:

Go to:
Control Panel
Administrative Tools
Computer Management
Storage
Disk Management

Now click your 60 gig drive

Extend that drive into your other partition. (You may have to shrink the other first) Right click them to see the extend and shrink menu.

This should enable you to change the drive sizes respectively. 60 gig is IMO too small for a primary partition.

penguinofwar · 12-29-2011, 11:10 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by BillSPrestonEsq

Extend that drive into your other partition. (You may have to shrink the other first) Right click them to see the extend and shrink menu.

This should enable you to change the drive sizes respectively. 60 gig is IMO too small for a primary partition.

Agreed, I was hoping that I could just make the 400 gb my primary partition. Do you think I should try to keep my OS files on an entirely seperate partition? It seems like thats what my laptop was made to do, but for some reason it just defaulted to store everything on my OS partition. This could be tricky just because I've installed a lot of stuff thats currently on my OS partition.

Also, if I moved everything to my larger partition in order to keep them seperate, how would I make sure that future installments don't just go straight to my OS partition?

***BillSPrestonEsq*** · 12-30-2011, 12:00 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by penguinofwar

Agreed, I was hoping that I could just make the 400 gb my primary partition. Do you think I should try to keep my OS files on an entirely seperate partition? It seems like thats what my laptop was made to do, but for some reason it just defaulted to store everything on my OS partition. This could be tricky just because I've installed a lot of stuff thats currently on my OS partition.

Also, if I moved everything to my larger partition in order to keep them seperate, how would I make sure that future installments don't just go straight to my OS partition?

I would not. I understand putting things on separate drives, but for me extra partitions are just an extra pain.

dtaylorl · 12-30-2011, 11:12 PM

Yeah, depends what you are doing, I have a Windows partition, an Ubuntu partition, and a separate storage partition that I can access from either OS. Not sure if I would use multiple partitions if I wasn't dual booting.

kneelie · 12-30-2011, 11:32 PM

I like a dual partition setup. I use one for The OS and programs and one for everything else. I tell my email client, Itunes, Kindle, and other programs to use the secondary partition for storage.

It is easier to backup my files and if things go bad it is easier to restore. If programs were not tied to the registry they would also be in the secondary partition.

While I have a few other partitions, I run Win7, Win8 Beta, and Linux flavor of the month, even with one OS I still would go with dual partition setup.

I advise having a secondary hard drive for backups. I hope you'll never need it, but if you do it will be a great relief.