New hard drive bought- Best way to set it up?

Hey all!

Just bought a new 250gb hard drive, since my system started making noises a few nights back, I didn't want to take any chances.

I already have 2 drives; C and I. C=Pagefile drive. I=Backup stuff/Blitz stuff (also backed up)

Now, preferably i'd like to keep my current Drives in, that contains drive D,F and G. D=windows,F=Programs,G=Downloaded stuff/fun/stuff to pratt about with.

I also have a DVD drive- this is the key point;

Connecting a hard drive with a DVD drive used to slow the main drive down. Is this still the case?

What would be the best way to do this? Also, what would be the best way to layout the new drives? I'm going to keep the seperate drive's C partition (start of the boot drive) as the pagefile.

Thanks for your oppinions. Mission start time: T-120 minuits

One monolithic partition would probably work.

split it and rename the partions in xp as u will

if u have a chance use only one drive on ide 0
cdrom /dvd rom slow down the HD in most cases

I always partition off the first 25% so that I have a super fast partition for games or whatever (windows swap file) because the speed at the start of the drives is double that at the end generally.

What Noel said.

E.

If it is a boot drive...it depends on what operating system and Service Pack he's under. Anything less than XP with built in SP2 and Windows XP would not recognise anything in a single partition over 128GB.

IPete2.

ive got 2 80 gb and 1 71gb partition out of it

It turns out my boot partition is fecked though, i'll need to re-arrange the drives. I can't be arsed now. :-)

Right, so, my old 40gb boot drive carked it last night, (I sat there and watched the Smart health warnings start from 255 and hit about 120 before I went to bed.

I'd left my main drive's backing up. (Made sure to save my blitz stuff first) and went to bed- at 1:45am. The backup got to about 30mins left.

Woke up in the morning and the machine had frozen, and i'm not sure if the backup completed, but it does mean that i'll now have a 120gb drive and a 250gb drive rather than a 40 and a 250. 370gb of space- what am i going to do with that?

One of the 80gb partitions is my website. No need for that either!

370gb will do you until you can put in another hard drive.

I would go with a single partitionsimply for convenience's sake. with multiple partitions you always end up short on one, and waste space on the other.

Although there is an exception: If you are thinking about doing any dual-booting any time soon (e.g. XP + Linux or something), it can be very helpful if you have a seperate parition of 'sufficient' space that you can (re)dedicate to the 2nd OS at some point, without needing to wipe your entire drive.