Partition for Scratch disc

MF
Posted By
Many_Feathers
Aug 22, 2006
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201
Replies
4
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Closed
I haven’t been here in awhile, but I need help! 🙂

My hard drive crashed. I put in a new hard drive and reinstalled Windows XP and added the updates. I partitioned the hard drive to have what I thought was 5 gig for the scratch disc, but it turned out it was only 5 meg! Oh dear…

How can I partition the hard drive now? Do I have to redo the whole thing…calling for activation numbers for Windows, Outlook, PS CS2, all over again? Tell me there’s a quick fix!

Thanks so much
Related Tags
disk partition scratch

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H
Ho
Aug 22, 2006
Partitioning the main system disk for Scratch usage serves little (if any) purpose. I would recommend adding a second drive and creating a partition on it for your Scratch file. Use the rest for storage and backups.
AC
Art Campbell
Aug 22, 2006
A scratch disk should be on an entirely separate hard drive, not a partition.

The idea is to separate tasks so that two hard drives can work in parallel on the same operation. If you simply partition a single hard drive, it makes the physical hard drive do the work of two — logically, you can call the partitions separate drives but the same disks and arms read and write the data.

So the solution is to add a second hard drive.

If you want to remove the partition on the primary hard drive, you can try a utility such as PartitionMagic… But if it was me, I’d just leave it alone, add the second drive, and move on.

Art
AC
Art Campbell
Aug 22, 2006
A second thought….

When you say your original drive crashed, you mean it totally physically died, or just got so flakey you couldn’t depend on it?

If it was still alive at all, I’d configure that drive as the secondary (slave) hard drive and put it back into the chassis. Format it and see what happens… Worst case is you blew an hour, best case is you save some cash by not buying a second drive.

* ** Also, if it was me, I’d think about using the second drive as a data storage drive, to keep all the files off the C: drive. It may just be me, but most of my hard drive failures have had something to do with the OS or applications. So I keep my data separate these days…

Art
MF
Many_Feathers
Aug 22, 2006
Hi Art,

Thanks much for your comments.

Yes, the hard drive actually died…and this is on my laptop, so I can’t add a hard drive to the chassis 🙂 I could use an external, but I think that wouldn’t be as good, right?

I know it’s better to have a separate hard drive, but can’t do so with the laptop…unless it’s external…so I thought it was still better to have it at least partitioned. Would love your comments on this.

Thanks much…

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