Formatting 500GB drive

>formatting 500GB drive
>installing Windows 7
>looking for optimal partitioning scheme

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diskpart

If Windows 7 is going to be the only OS, then I'd say

60 GB partition for the OS - keep there only the OS itself and software most important/most tightly coupled with the OS;
140 GB partition for software - install any software such as games, larger applications, and anything that does not go right with the OS on the first partition;
rest of the disk (about 265 GB) for data, i.e. all kinds of files you have stored, be it documents, music, video, ebooks, etc. It's possible to redirect the "Documents" system directory to another partition, and it's recommended to do this.

In comparison to a Linux system, the second partition would be a rough counter part of the /usr/share directory, and the third one of the /home directory.

Of course the exact sizes may vary depending on your specific needs (maybe you'd need 300 GB for programs but only 100 GB for data etc.), my suggestion is more of a general partitioning concept with rough estimates for how large the partitions could be. Making the OS partition too large should be avoided so that system files won't get dispersed too much across the disk.

Btw the installer is going to make a 100 MB boot primary partition for the boot loader which is going to be active, so the three other partitions can all be logical drives on an extended partition rather than primary partitions.

>/usr/share

Pardon me, I meant /usr/local.

What is the point of having different partitions for OS and software?

To keep programs after reformat

What about programs that infect registry and windows\system32 directory?

OP here,I think I will go with your scheme,but with a 250/150 split for programs/data as I tend to play larger games(WoW,Starcraft) and use larger software(games engines)

Not only this. It's explained right at the end of that post.

>Making the OS partition too large should be avoided so that system files won't get dispersed too much across the disk.

If you have a 200 GB volume for both OS and software, after some time your core OS files are going to be dispersed all over those 200 GB. Back in the day I used to keep XP on a 10GB volume only to keep the core OS physically confined to a small region of the drive (beginning of the drive is the fastest on HDDs).

If you have more computers you might want to keep most data on a NAS anyway and dedicate most of the local drive to installed software, with only a small data partition for data files which need to be kept locally on the specific PC. Stuff like music of videos are best kept on a network drive so they are accessible from any host on the LAN.

(OP)
Like so.
C - whatever's left
D - 409600 MiB (400GiB)

Use gparted. Will also prevent Windows from creating system whatever partition of 100MB.

you can launch diskpart from the command line during installation also

>wow
>starcraft
>larger games

>diskpart
Does it support to create an exactly 429496729600 bytes (or 400 GiB) partition to rest my OCD?

Yes, you can set the size to whatever you want I'm sure, I guess gparted is friendlier thanks to GUI though.

>Will also prevent Windows from creating system whatever partition of 100MB.

+try to create a 100gb partition
+windows will create a 400mb partition and a 99gb partition
+create a "second" partition of 389 gb
+delete 99gb partition
+expand 400 mb partition to 100 gb
+done

wow is like 30 gigs at this point..

Hmm,

>boot gparted
>create two partitions
>install windows on first partition
done

>boot windows cd and try to create a partition
>see how it joke with you and it keep creating a 100 mb partition
>search for a gparted cd
>not able to find it
>burn a new one
>boot gparted cd
>the screen is funny
>reboot gparted in failsafe mode
>create 2 partitions
>boot windows cd
>install windows

I have a 120GB SSD with nothing except Windows 8.1 and the installed programs that wouldn't allow me to change the drive on it, and it's already almost full.

It kept filling up after a series of windows updates; i've cleared things in programs and deleted the backups and done dynamic linking, but it still remains.

Install them under Sandboxie or some other sandboxing program.
Essentially makes them portable.

I have NOT tried this for sure though.
I think there MIGHT be issues with the user accounts in the local registry, since a new OS will have a new user account ID, and some programs will probably reference the user account directly instead of using current user cache.
But if it does, you'd basically need to do a find & replace of all references to your old user account with your new OSes user account in the registry hive for that sandbox. Easy stuff really.

Either that or just install your programs with some registry watcher, export them all to file, then reimport after. (and optionally replacing your user IDs again)

Honestly, better off doing the sandboxie one.
Sandboxie is better in the sense that it also locks your programs in a sandbox and can protect against some viruses if you were stupid enough to run one.
Equally you can make easy backups of your installs for games you mod, and have multiple installs of the same games you do said modding with. (even Steam games, just need to set the install directory manually)

why would you have windows with multiple partitions? it would only be annoying

>>see how it joke with you and it keep creating a 100 mb partition

It does this so the user won't mess with the boot loader files. The boot partition is a primary which is made active but isn't assigned a letter so it's won't be mounted unless you assign it a letter manually. It's kinda like in Linux where you put /boot on a separate volume (doesn't need to be a primary partition as Linux bootloaders can generally boot from any kind of volume) but don't add it to fstab (there will be a /boot directory but it will be empty).

To get around the installer making the separate "hidden" (or rather non-mounted, a real hidden partition is yet something else) boot partition, simply make a primary partition that's large enough to hold the OS and then make it active - the Windows bootloader must be on the active partition and the installer will then put it there along with the rest of the OS.

do i need repartition ? i have 1tb hdd on my laptop everything were there still 500gb empty though. Should i do it ?

I lose my mind over this, I started out at 145 GB when I first installed Windows. I don't have any programs installed except for MPC-HC, Chrome and Malwarebytes Anti-Malware and I'm at below 130 GB now and I have no idea how.

Yes, the partition alignment which is being used since about a decade now (and which is now really required due to Advanced Format drives with 4kB physical sectors) has partition boundaries on full megabytes, so you can have them quite exact (they may be a tiny bit smaller effectively due to some filesystem overhead). The earlier CHS alignment had partition boundaries on full cylinders which were usually a little less than 8 megabytes (assuming 255 heads per cylinder) so the partition size was almost always a few megs off from what you may have intended, there's really no reason to use them now unless you have an older non-AF drive (with the old alignment on an AF drive you'll end up having cluster boundaries within a single physical sector due to 63 sectors per track in CHS, which will severely reduce performance) and you are going to use some old software which specifically relies on CHS partition alignment.

That's pretty average now. GTA V is over 60, Rainbow Six Siege is over 50, Fallout 4 is over 40

Install Windirstat and let it scan the volume, it will show you where the space has gone. Once you figure out what has hogged all the space, you might find some information on how to reclaim at least some of it.

I guess that it's largely due to nowadays laziness of Windows developers and maintainers. By making the OS grow ridiculously large they might also try to coerce people into either buying overpriced prebuilt NAS servers, or into uploading their stuff into "muh cloud".

Let me guess, most of it being uncompressed audio and textures.

You format to remove all programs in the first place.

>If you have a 200 GB volume for both OS and software, after some time your core OS files are going to be dispersed all over those 200 GB

Not true, files don't move magically.

If you use Windows Update at all to install Windows, well, updates, you should know that Windows normally keeps all of the files it changes(or at least diffs? not sure). That way it can restore them should you wish to uninstall the update.

You can make it forget all about the old files using DISM or some other obscure Windows tool.
This page covers some of it: blog.brankovucinec.com/2014/11/06/use-dism-to-cleanup-winsxs-after-windows-update/

Be aware that once you issue the command to "rebase"/"make the current files the new starting point", you can't roll back updates anymore. You can manually if you have access to old files, but it's advised against: you could've uninstalled the update(s) yourself before you ran that command.

Before aegis.voat and whatnot became stale/died, it was great for saving space. It still is, but I fear getting the Telemetry updates permanently. I have to look through each update now, and that's a hassle.
Luckily I only use Windows 8(7 fucks up touchpad) for games.

They don't move magically, but they do move as part of filesystem operations such as removal of files, replacing files with another version of a different size, creating new files etc. which all happen all the time as the OS is running, let alone if you update it and install/uninstall software on the OS volume. If it were as you say, fragmentation would not be an issue. The less free space on the volume, the more chaotic the space allocation becomes. If the system volume is kept reasonably small, you can at least prevent core system files from ending up strewn all over the place.

Most programs and games all install registry entries, new services, etc. etc.

You can't reliably just dump stuff into a folder and expect it to work, because it won't.

It's almost like windows updates take up space, crazy.

Maybe that's why Win7 uses more disk space than Win10 after a decade worth of patches.

>You format to remove all programs in the first place.

Not necessarily, you recreate the filesystem on the OS volume primarily to have a fresh installation of the OS itself, the more programs you can keep, the better. Many programs, even if not officially portable, can recreate their registry entries and/or work files in the user profile as they are first run.

But it's 7 years old at this point. That's closer to half a decade than to a decade.

That's why you use Sandboxie.
Sandboxie installs everything in a write-locked folder.
It can only read outside, but not write outside.
The registry writes are done in a local registry as well.

There is a plugin for blocking reads outside of it as well, so it is a fully locked to that folders location.
But I've never used that. I assume it only allows read-only access to some system files needed by most programs, but no access to any other non-system files.

wow is a game which gets bigger every 2 years
an innovative self-bloating game

i have a few versions here;
original (2004-2006): ~5.5G
WotLK (2008-2010): ~18G
mists (2012-2014): ~27.2G

Don't fall full the multi partition meme. It's a waste of time. Just have 1 partition and don't be retarded.

I have no idea why that game is so bloaty.
Any time I have seen it, it looks fairly simplistic.

Surely they use templating and a base texture pack they can re-use in future patches?
Doing that can minimize how many textures you need overall, and more so it actually makes sure the games style is similar from patch to patch.
Template models for as many scenarios as you can think of too, such as having various armor templates, armors with various spines, with overhangs at the legs, 2, 1, straight line from waist, etc. Doing them all at once can save a lot of time and money overall.

Equally doing realtime procedural generation can add to game variety without taking much size.
A simple example is just plain grass, gravel, sand, then you can have some simple grayscale texture overlays for stones, pebble, wood, boulders, leaves, etc.
You can now overlay those textures at random over the whole world whereas typically a developer would make separate textures for random non-important stuff and place it manually.
Making the game do it automatically just saves a fuckload of development time and storage space, and it doesn't really take much in terms of CPU cycles.

But I don't know much about WoW, so I can't comment much.
Never have been much for MMOs. I barely play games as it is, I'd rather not pay money to not play a game for more than three quarters of the month.

i've known at least someone who plays it right from the start
but i didn't have the money for it, it was just this year i read about a particular private server being shutdown that got me into looking around for others
as it turns out, private servers for wow nowadays are pretty impressive, some with several thousand players on at any one time, it doesn't feel as "barren" as i figured they would

it was pretty fun for a few months, but ultimately i'm not a very social person, and there's only so much you can get out of it alone or with one-off quest partying

oh, and yea, the overall style of the graphics hasn't really changed since, well, warcraft III
but there's more and more finer details and effects added in each one, not to mention new areas, quests, items, races, etc. it adds up

Yeah same.
When he started playing that, he sort of just vanished from MSN for like a year.
Oh man, MSN days, RIP MSN Messenger 6.5, best version. That plus Messenger Discovery and Msg+ was fun as fuck for trolling multi-convos by using the mimic command to look like other people to shitpost.

Also, now that I look, I never knew just how many expansions there were too.
Only game I ever really played that got loads of expansions was Sims1 so I could fuck around in it.
I remember once running a prison. I'd throw a party, let them swim in to a one-way trap, then keep them there.
I modded it so they'd not become stuck in that loop of wanting to leave forever, which stops them doing everything else. (like basic survival skills...)
I'd feed them through a canteen that was 2 way, but they couldn't walk since it was walled off with drawers all around the serving space.
Fun times.
Never bothered with any other Sims. Sims 2, tried to install on my shitty old laptop with an 80GB hard drive and 660Mhz processor. Best specs. It crashed mid install and left me in a tiny resolution for some reason. Never installed it again.

heh, i messed around with sims1 also
i didn't get it myself, it was my sister who got it and played it more
haven't even looked at sims2 or whatever else there is

(my sister also used msn, which is how i got onto that, i'd still be using it if it wasn't dead)

Somewhat similar situation.
Currently on 128GB SSD + bunch of HDDs for data. 3 year old win7 installation that BSODs once in a while.
Just got a 500GB SSD.
Guess I'll just use the whole SSD for a fresh windows install + programs. I could clone the old SSD but given that it's probably fucked somewhere that may not be a great idea.
Maybe I'll use the old SSD for a couple of programs or games or some shit.

I just fucking HATE doing a fresh windows install and reinstalling all the drivers and programs.

Sims 1 was so much fun for fucking around in.
And it was easy to mod it yourself as well. (both graphically and logic)
I remember using this one neat tool some guy made that let you edit the interactions with people. I added some extra emotion and skill interactions. (never added any extra model animations though, fuck that noise)

I think most people stopped using MSN around the days they released the versions with those shitty winks and nudges. MSN 7 onwards, then WLM rename, holy hell so awful.
Even the modders for MSN gave up for the most part.

I remember once having a plugin called Advanced Display Picture.
It let you use larger DPs, but it also let you have interactive DPs.
I had a DP with 3 spaces for messages that everyone could see updating.
I ended up having 2 people flirting through it. Till this day, those 2 guys don't know who it was. Still makes me laugh whenever I remember.

##

Also, on topic, there is one case against using partitions for a HDD and especially SSD : It increases the amount of writes needed to move files between partitions.
A write on the same partition only needs to update the location of the file to the new folder, the file itself doesn't need to move.
Moving to another partition moves the whole file.

So if you do multi-partition, be sure to set up some nice hard- / symlinks for things like your documents, downloads folder, temp and other stuff.
It's never fun when your OS partition runs out of space.
I made that mistake for a period when I set the OS partition for XP at 30GB with no moved storage locations. Manually moving shit was no fun. Don't do it!

the main reason you'd make a small os partition at the beginning of a hdd is because that's where the drive is fastest
if you look at any hddtune graph or similar, you'll notice performance ramps down the further "in" to the drive you get
that's also why full hdd's are horrendously slow, you're both writing to the slowest part of the disk, AND you're probably also being hit with heavy fragmentation as there's little contiguous space left

none of this applies to ssd's, they perform the same everywhere, so unless you have some other reason to use multiple partitions, don't bother, make it one partition

Because all map, model and text data is being stored on your disk locally. This way they minimize the amount of bandwidth spent by their users and blizzard's servers. It's a much better option than having to re-download the map every time you visit a new zone. You can literally play the game an entire day and less than 400mb would be transmitted.

So much troubles just to avoid installing something again.

Yeah, that is a definite advantage for an HDD.
That's why I made my first an OS partition.
But then quickly realized I filled the space with files, which is when I moved and symlinked folders to the storage partition.

I tried an experiment with having multiple storage partitions to see if it worked out well for general storage.
But after a few years, I've realized it was silly and just led me to moving files between partitions, just adding to the wear and tear of the drive.

So much troubles?

When it comes to large, stupid installers, it's trivial to just ctrl+H a sandboxes registry hive to convert the user account over in the case of the few silly programs that refer to the hard coded user ID branch instead of current user branch and save.
You'll likely not even need to do it these days since Microsoft started to force developers to clean up their shitty coding practices that polluted registries.

Equally less painful if you've modded a game, or it is generally massive.
Or, worst of all, online installers. Infinite ragestallers.
Then you've got setting things up again, because most games, programs and such lack an export settings feature.

Fine if you are speaking about small random programs and that. Those are no problem.
Especially the ones that are just install-and-play without needing much setup.

>60 GB partition for the OS

Don't listen to this guy. 60GB is not even close to enough these days for Win7 and up. At least 120GB is required, but make it 200GB to be comfortable.

>I tried an experiment with having multiple storage partitions to see if it worked out well for general storage.
at a certain point it makes more sense to just defrag more often, than to try to manually partitions many things off

depends on your usage, i use windows (7) only for solidworks and a couple games which don't work in wine
it's on a 64G partition
(arguably, i don't keep it up to date, not that it goes online)

Yeah. That's what I ended up doing.

I've also stopped caring much about organizing files toooo much.
I've wrote a script to organize misc files in to groups based on file extensions.
Did that a while back to organize random shit I've downloaded over the years.

I'm writing a new version before I start to move it to new drives that will make better use of folders.
Going to save based on file type groups then file extension.
So, images -> png / jpg / gif / other, web -> html / script / markup / other, and so on.

Also thinking of doing another thing, mainly for sanity and pseudo-organization.
I'm thinking of limiting the number of files per file extension folder to being in sub-folders of 4000 each.
So it would be images\jpg\0001 [4000 jpgs here], 0002 [another 4000], etc.
Especially useful for some programs because they blow ass at opening large directories all at once.
4000 seems to be a decent number from limited testing.

I've got most of the foundations of the script planned out.
Trying to decide if I should hardcode the file groups like I did with the last script, or save it to a file to make it easy to add and edit stuff.
But I'd rarely be editing file extension groups, so it is a bit of a moot point in that regard.
Eh, I'll care tomorrow. Actually I won't, friends birthday dinner hijinks. I'll care Sunday

hey are you still here?

people will answer dumb questions like

Uhm, yes. Why?

I help people in Win 7 related things in general (:

For Windows 7+ just let Windows sort it. Don't partition at all, just install to the blank disk and let Windows do its thing. SSD alignment will be correct also.

You can do better so it doesn't create the system partition. It also becomes easier to image/restore that partition.

thanks for that windows update info. helped me so much

was wondering if you knew how to disable these adverts and sponsor links on my google searches. they tak up like 60% of screenspace and tried everything and nothing gets rid of them

forgot to mention they don't show up on chrome at all signed out or in. but they will not go away on FF

helping people is good but not when they can spend 5 mins of googling and solving the problem themselfs

addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/
chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpalhdlnbpafiamejdnhcphjbkeiagm?hl=en
Not much else can be done. Also this:
winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm

Well, yeah. But the update issue I figured it myself after nearly pulling my hairs out because my system was not updating. I haven't seen it on the internet anywhere. I've seen other methods, different updates, which failed for me. Mine worked, and everyone who tried it also worked for them.

alrdy have ublock and umatrix. I think it has something to do with google's settings

5GB Windows
595GB Gentoo

>giving "advice" when he doesn't know what he's talking about

But that's in direct contradiction to the "muh cloud" philosophy which is being pushed down everyone's throat, and which rests on the assumption that the user can't be trusted with storing data locally, and that bandwidth, data caps, or even availability of a connection at all times are not an issue whatsoever.

Im getting my first ssd soon. Should i bother with partitioning for performance sake, or just if i want it for organization sake?

I just keep one drive for OS installs and another for independent files.

Don't you think that it's a bit excessive if you let an OS which occupied about 10 GB on fresh install need 200 GB? Also note that it's just the OS and stuff that's most closely related to it (or stuff that has a retarded installer which installs to the system volume and won't let yo change it) which is supposed to be installed there. If for only the OS, updates, and a couple of not so large programs 60 GB is plenty, assuming that you know that you're doing.

Which is a good thing. Cloud is a pile of shit. Blizzard did good back in the day deciding to give players the entire game content offline. The reason they kept going with the same model is probably because the engine is not worth rebuilding right now. It's old enough and requires specs so low that even current gen smartphones could run it. But it still works extremely well for both sides, client and server.