P3D Hard Drive Partitioning

["Dr. George A. Themelis" <DrT-3d@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

As I said, this was diverted off the list.  Enjoy! -- George
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Concerning the partitioning of hard drives, it is my understanding
that if you are using the current versions of Windows 95 (OSR2 or later) 
or Windows NT, you can chose to have your hard drive partitioned in the 
FAT32 (file allocation table) format.  It is also my understanding that, 
using this format, there is very little "wasted" file space because the 
minimum file size requirement is no longer a function of the partition 
size as was the case with the older FAT16 format.  Furthermore, I was of 
the impression that it is highly recommended that you use the FAT32 
format if your hard drive is 2.5 GB or larger.  Please feel free to 
correct me if I am misunderstanding the FAT32 format.

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For those people partitioning your hard drives, you may be interested in 
an excellent program called "Partition Magic" by Powerquest 
(http://www.powerquest.com). It allows hard disk partitioning 
"on-the-fly," i.e. if you run out of space on one of your partitions, 
just go into the software and juggle space around from another partition 
(drive) that has extra space. There is no re-formatting of your hard 
drive and the information on the disk is not harmed (although it's 
always a good idea to make regular back-ups of your data anyway). I keep 
all my data (i.e. created files as opposed to programs) on a separate 
drive from my programs and I only have to back up one drive. If a 
program becomes damaged it's easy enough to re-load, but I've never had 
this happen due to anything caused by Partition Magic. I manage an 8 gig 
hard drive with it. Partitioned drives make it a lot easier to run 
diagnoatics, too. This program can be used on Win 3.X and Win95 and 
takes advantage of Fat32 where it can. Hope this helps.

Andrea S. Blair
asblair@xxxxxxxxxxx


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