Partitioning drives on a new recording studio PC

Archived from groups: rec.audio.pro (More info?)

Ally wrote
>Hi folks,
>I've just buit a PC for my recording work, using various sequencer
>programs - but I also want to use the same PC to run other (business)
>applications, such as MS Office.
>
>The System has two ATA hard drives:
>1) 120 GB
>2) 80 Gb
>And there's a CD-RW slaved to the second HD.
>
>Initially, I was planning to use the primary drive for:
>a) The OS (oem Win XP home edn.)
>b) Music recording programs
>c) Music files produced with (b).
>
>And the secondary drive for:
>a) A second copy of XP so I can boot from that disc in emergency.
>b) A few business applications such as MS Office 97
>c) A backup of the music files on the other drive.
>
>Does this sound OK? Anyone offer any suggested refinements? Any
>problems with having two copies of XP, one on each disc?
>
>What about partitioning the drives? Should I have a separate partition
>for the OS? If so, how big? How about the remaining part of each
>drive? Divide it or leave as one partition?

I have a PC I use for my normal computer stuff (games, Internet, etc.) and I
have a Mac G4 that is strictly for audio. The Mac was an off the shelf computer
that I sent to some pro studio techs and they modified it for all my recording
programs and such, I do nothing but recording on the Mac and I do no recording
on the PC.
When I first got the PC I partitioned it off (when I installed Windows, ME)
into small drives, I later regretted this move as some of my Works Suite
software would not allow me to browse and pick where I wanted it to be
installed. I had plenty (30 Gigs) of space on one partition but only some space
(less than 5 Gigs) on the main partition where my OS was installed. So, after a
few weeks of pulling my hair out I went out and got Wipe Disk and started over
from scratch, making sure to have just one partition. I don't know if you can
run two OS's one on each partition or not so I can't tell yes or no.

Archived from groups: rec.audio.pro (More info?)

Laurence Payne wrote:
> What's Wipe Disk? What does it do that FDISK and FORMAT.COM don't?
> Now, Partition Magic could have been useful :-)

Neither FDISK nor FORMAT will write zeros in the boot sector.
FORMAT is not surprising, since its job is to write only into
the partition and never into the boot sector. However, it
would be really nice if FDISK or some other tool would do that.

You'd be amazed at the number of times I've seen some Windows
installer or other installer freak out because it THINKS it
understands what's already on the disk. It autodetcts and
it wants really, really badly to help you out by assuming that
whatever partition information is on the disk is valid and
assuming that you care about what's on the disk and want to
preserve it. However, often what you want is to instead have
a totally clean install.

There have been several times I've gotten an operating system
to install by removing the disk, putting it into a Solaris
machine, and using Solaris's "format" (which bears no relation
at all to the DOS one -- it doesn't even do vaguely the same
thing) to write a pattern like 0xAAAAAAAA all over the first
few megabytes of the disk. Once you do that, the OS installer
stops assuming that you want to preserve your FAT16 filesystem
(that doesn't exist anymore), etc., etc.

- Logan

Archived from groups: rec.audio.pro (More info?)

"Ally" <Ally888@nospamxyz.com> wrote in message
news:4106116d.878805@news.individual.net...
> Initially, I was planning to use the primary drive for:
> a) The OS (oem Win XP home edn.)
> b) Music recording programs
> c) Music files produced with (b).
>
> And the secondary drive for:
> a) A second copy of XP so I can boot from that disc in emergency.
> b) A few business applications such as MS Office 97
> c) A backup of the music files on the other drive.

I'd put all the programs on the first drive. And a copy of any mission
critical programs on the second drive ready to go if the first fails.

> Does this sound OK? Anyone offer any suggested refinements? Any
> problems with having two copies of XP, one on each disc?

It works fine for me.

> What about partitioning the drives? Should I have a separate partition
> for the OS? If so, how big? How about the remaining part of each
> drive? Divide it or leave as one partition?

I like to have a suitable size recording partition that is always empty when
not recording.
The only advantage is that I don't need to defrag the drive before
recording.
If you are doing 8 tracks at 24/96 for example, you don't want a fragmented
disk to worry about.

TonyP.

Archived from groups: rec.audio.pro (More info?)

On Tue, 27 Jul 2004 10:37:22 +0200, Ally wrote:
> Initially, I was planning to use the primary drive for: a) The OS (oem
> Win XP home edn.)
> b) Music recording programs
> c) Music files produced with (b).
>
> And the secondary drive for:
> a) A second copy of XP so I can boot from that disc in emergency. b) A
> few business applications such as MS Office 97 c) A backup of the music
> files on the other drive.

I would avoid all non recording studio applications on a recording studio
PC. So no office applications, web browsers, mail programs, etc. on your
DAW.

Think about adding replacing the CD-RW drive by a DVD+RW drive, they are
better to store recordings in a safe way, and not too expensive EUR 60,=.

--
Chel van Gennip
Visit Serg van Gennip's site http://www.serg.vangennip.com