Back up your data
Anyway I do recommend alway's have a second partion seperate from the C drive. That way if you ever need to reinstal windows you can do it easily without worrying about your data.
Oh I agree also if you download some nasty infected file it will keep it from spreading and srewing up everything. I have 2 750GB hard Drives and I split them up in half so it looks like I have 4 hard drives. It makes it more organized too. Like drive: M has all my music it in (figured M for music), Drive: L has my apps and more important docs, Drive: J is my download (torrent) drive and nothing leaves that file before it has been really inspected (I scan it all before I open it anyways), Drive: C is my pics and reg. docs. This is also why I have 4 externals - one for each drive 
I have 2 750GB hard Drives and I split them up in half so it looks like I have 4 hard drives.
, have a look at my drive bar. Most of those hard drives are partitions, though one is a second hard drive that I use for dual booting (actually I triple boot: Vista, XP Pro and OpenSUSE linux).
, R is a Flash Drive
, Z is my recovery partiton. 
that kinda looks like mine
C & J are one HD , L & M a second HD, D & E are burners, F, G, H, I, K are empty USB's, N has a flashdrive plugged into it now (a corsair one) , A is for my media card reader and O is a virtual DVD/CD player (Daemon tools)
Are you running Vista? F-K look like prime candidates for Readyboost. 
Yep Vista 64bit. Yeah I normally have a flash plugged in the back and use readyboost but I pulled it to plug something into it (can't remember) and forgot to put the flash back in. Another thing to do in the AM - nite all
UPDATE: If your wondering what Readboost is you can read it here: How to optimize Vista with Readyboost
I'm completely lost in this thread. Here goes the extent of my "backup"... Pictures, and important files are on cd's / Flash Drives. I have not a clue how to do any more than that 
Actually I'm lying... I know how to dial DoGG's phone. 
*lol* Chances are... I'll be whining here someday about how I lost stuff.
Maybe I should really try to learn how to do some of this, huh?
Do a little dance...
Actually I'm lying... I know how to dial DoGG's phone. *lol*
yeah i haven't had any issues yet but that was also going to be my plan of attack if ever a problem did arise... hahaha.
perhaps i should also learn this stuff a little better... *goes study*
Well partitioning is only going to help you if your HD gets some nasty little bug where you will only possibly loose the data on that one section and not on the others. If your hard drive crashes all together then regardless if you have it partitioned your SOL.
To explain it easier think of a sandwich (like a HD) you can leave it whole or cut it in half or in quarters. If a bug lands on that sandwich and its cut up you can simply toss the section he landed on and the other parts are fine. If you didn't cut it then well you might have to toss the whole sandwich out. 
Before you partion I would make sure all your data is backed be it DVD's, flashes or a external HD. You can pick up externals pretty cheap now days - newegg has some good deals. If your ever getting ready to toss a old pc you can also break it open snag the HD out of it and just get a empty HD case for it - they sell those too.
Man you guys have some serious drive partioning going on. I tend to only partion up to 3 times per drive. Just personal preference. I then like to organize by directories. But again that's just personal preference. Mom, I wish I had the external storage you do! That would be nice.
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I hope that after I die, people will say of me: "That guy sure owed me a lot of money."
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Yea backing up data is alway's a good idea. And I will admit that I need to do it more often. Right now my backup system is on the fritz and I don't have a good external. I use to run nightly backups to another computer simply using the built in backup utility in windows wich actually works quite well. But With all the music and pictures we have now I need a larger space to backup to. I really just want to get a big external drive.
Actually with how cheap large copasity hard drives are these day's it may be cheaper to just buy a large drive and get an external chasi to put the hard drive in. This turns it basically into an external hard drive. I have to do some priceing to see what is the cheapest. But we do upload most of the important photos to Walgreens so I'd have most my family photos backed up If my server went down. But I still need to get something going here soon.
Anyway I do recommend alway's have a second partion seperate from the C drive. That way if you ever need to reinstal windows you can do it easily without worrying about your data.
Another thing I forgot to mention is if your hard drive does ever die and will not reboot. You can try and do a repair on it by booting up to an xp install cd and hitting R for repair when it prompts you to. then this will take you to the repair utility. It will ask you what instalation of windows you wish to repair. Most of the time you will just have 1 so you would simply type 1 then enter. It will prompt you for the admin password. If you don't have one then simply hit enter. then you will get to a C:\ prompt. to do a checkdisk and have it repair any corruption you use the following, (chkdsk /r) without the parentheseis. Let it go through it's thing and see if windows will boot.
Another tip is if windows just will not boot up. You can try connecting it to another pc. The pc should see it as simply another hard drive and most of the time you can access the files and data on the disk. Just something to think about before tossing the drive or reformating it.
Hope that helps someone out in the future.
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I hope that after I die, people will say of me: "That guy sure owed me a lot of money."