[wplug] Partition moving

David Tessitor dttessitor at home.com
Mon Jan 1 16:31:35 EST 2001


Partition Magic can move on the same disk, but I think it just copies between
drives so you'd need to delete the old partition as an extra step (you'd be
wise to do it that way, anyway, after taking time to verify everything is
OK).  If you can wait until the weekend, I'll bring my floppy copy with me.
Of course, in the meantime, you could simply set up the new partition, then
highlight and do a file copy of everything.

As a small performance enhancement, you might want to keep a swap partition
for each OS on its opposite drive.  That way writing and reading can occur
concurrently, allowing the computer to read into memory at the same time it is
writing out from memory to the swap file.  -- At least that's what I've read.

Even if I'm only using a single drive, I set up a separate  partition for swap
in NT.  I designate it as follows:  settings --> control panel --> system -->
performance --> (under virtual memory) change --> select (highlight) the
partition under "Drive [Volume Label]" and fill in partition size for initial
and maximum size under "Paging File Size for Selected Drive" --> then hit
Set.  The advantage of such an arrangement is that one need not worry about
NT's swap maximum having other data interfere with it (reduce or fragment it).

Somewhere I bookmarked a howto for setting up a single partition for use as
both Linux swap and Windows swaps.  It conserves disk space enabling one to
have twice the swap partition space for each system.  I just read about it
recently, something about using a script on shutdown to provide selection of
the OS to be used for the next boot up.  If you're interested I can probably
hunt it down and get it for you.

Regardless, I would suggest you review your considerations first.  To maximize
performance and security, you might instead want to consider having your swaps
and data on one drive and your OS's and programs on the other.  That way you
isolate both on a performance basis (data tends to be accessed less frequently
than program operations, depending upon your buffering and autosave rates) and
on a security basis (your program partitions are physically separated from
your data).  If you only get one removable bay and tray, you can take out your
data for safer storage (keep your secret plots to take over the world locked
away in the vault when your not on the computer).

I've not had any incompatibility problems of NT or Linux partitions trying to
take over the other's space.  Unless you plan to operate with only one drive
at a time using them in removable trays with one bay, the total isolation of
each OS to a separate drive tends to be more a matter of aesthetics.

I'll send another post on alternative partition formats you might want to
consider.

Dave
---------

David G Matthews wrote:

> I just added a second 20 gig HD to my system.  My first drive has Win NT
> on a 4 gig NTFS system as the first partition, with the rest of the disk
> reserved for Linux.  I'd like to move NT to a 4 gig partition on the
> second drive, so that Windows and Linux reside on separate physical disks.
> The installation software that came with the new disk has a utility for
> moving entire disk partitions around, but it doesn't work on NTFS
> filesystems.  Does anyone know of a utility (for Widnows or Linux) that
> can move NTFS partitions?
> Thanks,
> dgm
>
> _______________________________________________
> wplug mailing list
> wplug at wplug.org
> http://www.wplug.org/mailman/listinfo/wplug




More information about the wplug mailing list