Windows 7 OS Partition size?.

I am intending to reformat my PC and wonder if it would be more sensible to create a partition on my hard drive for the windows operating system leaving the rest of the drive free for files programs etc. Can anyone point me to a tutorial or such detailing how I should approach this. The hard drive is 500GB and I would particularly like to know how big a partition is needed for the Win7 OS?. Is this a difficult process to do for someone with reasonable PC skills but certainly not an expert?.

If your HDD is completley re-formated you could do one of two things.
When you first run the installation disk for 7 it should give you the option to partition your HDD as you wish or if you want to have a play before actually installing the O/S then get the free program called Gparted.
Gparted will auto run from a CD on boot and allows you to format your HDD. As it's not an operating system it leaves nothing of itself on the drive once you close the program so you can safely have a bit of a play with partitioning your HDD.
That way you can just re-format and start again if your not happy with the results.
If you want a single O/S on your HDD (as opposed to dual boot) then I think 100Gb would be more then enough to allocate to the O/S and the other 400 for whatever else you want to do.

It's a very easy process to do during the Windows 7 install.

I personally recommend a 64GB partition size, but definitely no smaller than 48GB.

During the Windows 7 install you'll see a screen showing the hard drive and it's total size shown in GB, see below.



If you click on the Drive Options (Advanced) highlighted section it will show the drive in total MB though.

A 64GB partition is actually 65,536 MB in size, due to taking 64,000 MB X 1.024 factor.

I allow for the 100MB system reserved partition plus the 64GB which is 64,100MB, then times the 1.024 factor you get a partition size of 65,638.4 MB or rounded up to 65,639. Set the partition to that size and then Windows install will go from there.

The remaining space you can you for extra files, downloads, etc.

Is there really an advantage to partitioning the hard drive anymore?

A lot of users find it handy in the fact that they are able to keep the OS and other software onto one area of the hard drive and use the remainder of space for storing docs, photos, music and video files, excel and other documents.

Plus the OS is on the very outside of the platters of the hard drive which is the fastest access area of the drive.

Yes, it is. Keeping your OS separate from your data keeps your OS install fairly clean, and it doesn't get as fragmented. Therefore, it performs better in most cases.

Secondly, your data (photos, movies, music, docs, emails, etc) is separated from your OS, meaning that if your OS crashes, you don't lose your data. Note that this is NOT an excuse to not backup your data. But your data being on a separate partition makes it easier to backup, and keeps it safe from the OS.

This allows me to backup my data partition as a whole, rather than selecting a bunch of files/folders. Some free backup solutions, like Macrium, while great free programs, it doesn't do file/folder (data) backups. But being on a partition, I can backup my data with any free backup program (as a partition backup).

Hope this helps!

Cat

Keep it simple. Just split the HD into two partitions, 1/3 .. 2/3rds. with the built in (installation DVD) option. It is very easy, after you have installed your standard software, to shrink again to a useful size.

Hi,

i would leave yourself some room for expansion, i use win 7 64 and it is full of programs including some big ones like nero and photo x2, i have it in a 50gb partition and altogether only uses just over 40gb, so if your not a heavy program user 40gb should be enough and leave you room to add later, if you so wish.