topic Re: hard-drive setup on AR21S in PCs & Accessories

hard-drive setup on AR21S

jumbles1971 — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 15:04:51 GMT

I just got my AR21S back from the repairers and they've replaced one of the hard drives.

They'd recovered the drive using XP and I want to install Vista (from the express upgrade). I booted from the Vista DVD but when it got to the screen where you can create partitions and format drives I ran into a problem. It looked something like this...

Drive 0 - Partition 2 - 35GB Free - Primary
Drive 0 - Partition 3 - 35GB Free - Logical
Drive 1 - Not Allocated - 95GB Free

Booting into XP gives me two drives of about 45GB (C:) and 35GB (D:)

I can't guarantee it was exactly like that but hopefully it's close enough that someone knows what's happened and how to return it to how it used to be. If it wasn't set up as RAID, I'd know what to do but I don't know anything about RAID.

thanks
Jumbles

Re: hard-drive setup on AR21S

Thalamus. — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 15:27:41 GMT

Hi Jumbles,

do the post's in this thread offer any solutions..

Re: hard-drive setup on AR21S

jumbles1971 — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 16:04:56 GMT

That was interesting. I must have been one of the lucky ones as when I installed the Vista Express Upgrade the first time I didn't have any problems like the ones described in that post - it just installed. :smileygrin:

I also sorted my problem out. I remembered the System Recovery Disc (the one I made when I first got my laptop) had a RAID option so I had a look at that and restored the two drives to Striped (whatever that means).

My only problem now is should I make C: 100GB and have 😧 as only 86.3GB or the other way around or have both the same size? :smileythinking:

How easy is it to change once you have the OS installed?

Jumbles

Re: hard-drive setup on AR21S

Thalamus. — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 16:43:24 GMT

Hi Jumbles,

I would make your C drive something around 50 to 60G and the remainder as your D drive..

restored the two drives to Striped (whatever that means).

Raid 0 basicly spreads files in blocks across both of the hard drives therefore improving performance.. However if one drive fails then you will loose all the data..

Re: hard-drive setup on AR21S

jumbles1971 — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 16:55:29 GMT

I saw something along those lines in the that post you mentioned earlier but I thought it must have been a typo. Would you install most programs to the 😧 drive with that configuration?

I had thought about seeing if there was a way to have the Users folder on the 😧 drive, but until I get a bit more proficient with Vista I'm going to let programs install to their default locations. It's hard enough getting some old software to run at all under Vista as it is!

Re: hard-drive setup on AR21S

Thalamus. — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 17:01:05 GMT

I would install the programs on the c drive & my photo's, my documents, music files, etc on the D drive..

Re: hard-drive setup on AR21S

jumbles1971 — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 18:32:54 GMT

Blimey! I thought I had a lot of photos, music and videos at about 20GB!

Re: hard-drive setup on AR21S

Thalamus. — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 19:22:55 GMT

Blimey! I thought I had a lot of photos, music and videos at about 20GB!

LOL you don't have to follow my suggestion, do what you think is right for your usage, it's entirely up to you, you do not have to partition your drive at all, although having a separate partition from your operating system and applications, etc makes backing up of documents, photo's easier...