Hello, I am trying to partition a drive on a new laptop as many seem to recommend doing so. yet others advise against it. So, two questions: 1. Using Windows 7 Disk Management tool my 700GB HDD can only be shrunk to 336GB...which is strange for a brand new drive. Also 336GB is too much for the OS drive. Any ideas on why W7 Disk Management is giving me this restriction. Any tips? 2. Do I really need to partition? What are pros and cons? Thank you.
Get an application called partition magic. However, I do agree with others that say you probably don't need to do it.
The last time I had a hard disk failure (XP), everything on drive C (programs mostly) was lost but I managed to recover quite a bit of the data on drive D. Are things different with Windows 7?
Sorry for the lack of clarity, C and D were on the same physical drive, partitioned. Since the advice seems to be that partitioning is no longer necessary, my question is would it make a difference in the event of a failure? I still have the habit of putting programs and data on separate partitions, and yes the stuff that takes hours of work to create gets backed up every day. The odds and bods do not however.
A hard drive failure will kill some sectors or a hard drive. So if the hard drive is partitioned, its possible to copy data from the other partition of the same hard drive that was not corrupted. However, once a hard drive goes bad, you need to replace it anyway, and so this is not a good solution. Instead the best solution is to buy an external backup hard drive that you can connect using an USB cable. After that you have 2 options. 1) Backup just you important data manually every so often. (If you are just backing up data and photos, you don't need a big external hard drive. 2) Buy an application called Norton Ghost and backup your entire hard drive including applications. It really depends how many applications you have and if you have copies on CD to reinstall. (Norton Ghost is better if you are running a small business.) [For a medium to large business I would recommend getting a file server with a tape backup and store the tapes in a fire proof box].