The partitioning solution for your computer is dependant on several things: your operating system, the software you intend to install, your needs, and the size of your hard drive. You must take into consideration all four of these things in order to properly create a partitioned hard drive. If you have never partitioned your computer before, windows2K comes with a partitioning wizard and there are easy to use partitioning programs such as disk druid to work with your hard drive(s). Do not partition a disk that is currently holding data, you will lose said data in the reformed partitions.

In this editorial, I will ignore BeOS, Linux, and other non-microsoft operating systems and just resort to drawing out some general pointers on setting up partitions. I will begin assuming that you originally only know to make one partition all numbers from here are based on that one. Before you start to go into moare considerations, i recommend begining with a minimum of two partitions: one for software installation and one for user files and programs. The sizes should depend on the size of your hard drive and how many users you foresee having. By dividing up your hard drive in this way, you are able to avoid messing up software installations by having users who do not know where to store files have a logical drive where they can put them without having to endanger the software program files. Be sure that your software partition is atleast as big as the required space for your operating system or your computer will not run.

1) Determine if you want the computer to be single user or if you want to set up a multi or networked environment. In network cases, you need to check with your user support specialist for your network and ignore the rest of this article. For multiple user computers, you may want to consider splitting that user partition into separate partitions for each user and one partition for guest files/common files. YOu also might want to think about setting up a windows networking environment to limit user's access to other's partitions.

2) Figure out if you want to protect operating/system files. If so, you will want to separate the software partition further and use a networking environment to secure that partition. Make sure that users have read access or you may end up with system troubles though.

3) Decide if you want to further allocate space to certain types of software. FOr instance, if you only want graphics programs to take up 20% of your software partition you can do that with your partitions while you are working.

From here you must decide on your own if you want to further fragment your drives. Remember, the more drives that you have, the more confusing it may become to keep track of them all. Also, never make more than 20 partitions, this can result in problems allocating drive letters to disk drives and cdrom drives. Also make sure that your partitions are of the appropriate types. NT users need to have NT partitions, windows 95revised/98/2K users will want to use FAT32 partitions to preserve long file names and speed up windows operations.

If you run into trouble, remember that you can always go back and repartition your drive to have only one partition that takes up the entire drive.