Reformat/or fdisk......

[renakuajo]

'first of all the tips here are great been visiting here like 3 or 4 months now and i love it......so now i'm sitting here takin a nice and enjoyable alchoholic drink and need some tips to do a new clean install


i have xp pro installed (ntfs) i want to do a clen install you know a new start.....i put the cd but it wont let me erase my C cause srtup files are there

i have to HD Maxtor 23gb(ata66) and bigfoot12gb(ata33)

Which HD should i use to install XP? i was thinkin to use the bigfoot so that way i can put the swap file in the first partition of the fastest drive(maxtor) the size of the swap i was thinkin to use is 750MB

any ideas???

 

[gothic]

I think the popular thought would be to flatten your fastest drive, and partition it. If it's a Windows XP installation only (not dual booting) then obviously 'C' for Windows, and then ideally a small partition 'D' for the swap file. (depending on the amount of memory you run the swap file should be anything from 150 meg (if you have lots of ram) to 500 / 600 meg (if you have little ram)). It appears commonly acceptable that the swap file be of a static size, i.e. Initial size the same as Maximum size, this way disk activity is kept to a minumum.

Other people obviously are going to have alternative thoughts on this matter, so read ahead and hope all goes well.

ta ta

TOK

 

[Lonman]

I agree with gothic, put xp on your fastest drive. You should be able to do the format using the cd if your bios supports booting to cdrom. That's why it won't work right now because you're trying to do it from the active OS... booting to cd makes the cd the active OS.

 

[renakuajo]

ok so i put xp on my fastest drive....it is ok to put then the swap file on the other HD??

 

[Lonman]

What I would do, after the install and work out the kinks, is to defrag the drive, kill the pagefile, reboot, recreate it at the 750meg you want to use, and then reboot to reinitialize it. This should give you one continuous pagefile on your drive instead of one all fragmented willy nilly here and there. Then you can just leave it on your XP partition without being concerned about it fragmenting all over the drive.

I've experimented with different 'performance' boosts where the pagefile is concerned (different partition, etc) and the best boost i've found is to defrag my drive regularly. I use Diskeeper 7 and have it set to run every 24 hours at a time when I'm not using my machine. If you turn off your machine every night, then you can still use the 'set it and forget it' option to run at certain intervals (every 8 or 12 hours or at a specific time) without really taking a performance hit while doing small tasks like surfing the net or email (I wouldn't recommend defragging while ripping a dvd or something intensive though).