Partitions...I setup all of my systems with a minimum of two partitions and preferably 2 hards drives.
Drive 0 is say an 80gb HDD with two partitions C: and D:
C: is 30GB and holds the OS and the APPs.
D: is 50GBs and holds all the data downloads, patches, PICs, etc., etc.,
Drive 1 is 120GB and usually has 2 partitions:
E: 2GB partition for a swapfile and
F: 118GB partition for backup in the form of images of C: and D:
Once the system is setup...the OS, the drivers, the apps and the apps configured, I use Ghost create an image of C: on F:. Same with data on D: ...create an image on F:
If the C: becomes corrupt or won't boot...I get my imaging restore SW out and restore the image stored on F: back to C: If drive 0 dies completely ....I replace it and use the imaging SW to restore the images from F: back to C: and D:
If drive O wasn't partitoned and I restored the image it would most likely wipe out anything on the disk and eliminate any data not saved in the last image. If I simply restore the image of drive C: to the C: partition ....the D: partition remains unaffected. In this case separating the OS and APPs from the data allows you to wipe C: at any time without losing any of the data you've saved on D:.
I can only tell you if the sh*t hits fan...I can get back up and running faster this way than almost any other way I can think of. Backup and restores are very very quick with two hard drives. Drive C: takes 10-15 minutes and D: takes 15-20 minutes and I'm back in business. If I had to reinstall my stuff it would take 10-15 hours not mention the finding the disks, finding the product keys, downloading patches updates and reactivating or regsitering all the SW. I'm getting a headache just thinking about it. Just don't want to spend my time rebuilding my PC and restoring all the SW.
Make sense ? ANy questions ?
VAPCMD