Partitioning Hard drive

Passenger

Ok I want to create a single partition on my Hard Drive as I have three Disk partitions and it is slowing down my CPU drastically.

Any help on how I would do this would be appreciated.

trout

are you sure that your CPU performance is impacted by having three partitions ?

three partitions is not outrageous ...

I'd dig a little deeper before you change your disk org to improve CPU performance.

If you do want to change your partition table - backup your data first. Depending on your preferred OS, there are a number of ways to do this.

Passenger

trout wrote:

are you sure that your CPU performance is impacted by having three partitions ?

three partitions is not outrageous ...

I'd dig a little deeper before you change your disk org to improve CPU performance..

Where should I look? If I move a window onscreen the CPU performance reached 100% which is ridiculous. What's likely to be effecting it?

incisor71

Passenger wrote:

Ok I want to create a single partition on my Hard Drive as I have three Disk partitions and it is slowing down my CPU drastically.

Any help on how I would do this would be appreciated.

If you think your hard drive is slowing down the overall performance, the first thing to try is a disk defragmentation. I doubt very much that the slow performance has anything to do with having multiple partitions - I have two hard drives and six partitions between them, and experience no such problems.

However, if you have all your programs on the C drive, say, don't put your paging file (aka swap file) on a different drive on the same hard disk, as this is just asking for a performance bottleneck.

Having said all that, if you do want to remove/reorganise partitions, look into Partition Magic from Symantec (they bought out the original developers, PowerQuest). Tread carefully, though, and always, always back up valuable data before making alterations to your partitional structure.

.....I've just read your second post on the subject about CPU usage being at 100%.... have you sorted the process list in Task Manager according to CPU %ent usage to find what process(es) is/are eating all the processing power??

Passenger

incisor71 wrote:

If you think your hard drive is slowing down the overall performance, the first thing to try is a disk defragmentation.

I've Defragmented all partitions and it didn't really improve the performance.

incisor71 wrote:

.....I've just read your second post on the subject about CPU usage being at 100%.... have you sorted the process list in Task Manager according to CPU %ent usage to find what process(es) is/are eating all the processing power??

I will try that. Cheers.

incisor71

Passenger wrote:

I've Defragmented all partitions and it didn't really improve the performance.

incisor71 wrote:

.....I've just read your second post on the subject about CPU usage being at 100%.... have you sorted the process list in Task Manager according to CPU %ent usage to find what process(es) is/are eating all the processing power??

I will try that. Cheers.

One other thing that comes to mind - what is the nature of the application window you're moving, that it maxes out the CPU capacity? If you're moving the application window for Windows Media Player while a movie clip is playing, for example, or live video is being streamed, this can be very hard on the system.

Passenger

incisor71 wrote:

One other thing that comes to mind - what is the nature of the application window you're moving, that it maxes out the CPU capacity? If you're moving the application window for Windows Media Player while a movie clip is playing, for example, or live video is being streamed, this can be very hard on the system.

Using something like Word and scrolling through text can slow it.

liamo

I agree with the previous posters - a partitioned disk is not going to cause that behaviour.

A few questions :

1) What CPU are you using?
2) How much RAM do you have?
3) How much space is left on the system drive?
4) Are you using Anti Virus/Spyware software?
5) What led you to believe that having 3 partitions was the source of your problem?
6) When you originally partitioned the disk and installed Windows, was the performance at that time acceptable?
7) Was there a dramatic reduction in performance at some point or did it degrade gradually over time?

Regards,

Liam

jayneemac

you might want to download an anti-spyware program and do a full system scan.

Spybot-S&D
http://www.safer-networking.org/en/download/index.html


I seriously doubt it has anything to do with the number or partitions; in fact it's advisable to split up large hard disks into partitions to improve performance.

it sounds like you have a load of junk progies loaded into memory.
you might also want to update windows with the latest service packs if you haven't already done so...

Blowfish

Yeah, i'd say most likely say spyware aswell, though same thing would happen if your graphics drivers weren't installed, it wud use the CPU instead.

incisor71

liamo wrote:

2) How much RAM do you have?

For Windows XP I wouldn't use any less than 512MB of RAM (I'm using Win2k and have 1GB, but I do a lot of video editing/rendering). If you have less RAM, you'll eventually be forced to use more virtual memory and a larger swap file - and hard drive accesses to the swap file are always slower than RAM accesses.

liamo wrote:

3) How much space is left on the system drive?

For XP, things start to become unstable at anything less than 100MB free space.

liamo wrote:

4) Are you using Anti Virus/Spyware software?

Forgot to mention that - this is one of the standard technical support questions (or scapegoat questions, in the case of broadband helpline!!).

You might also like to see if you have unnecessary applications active in your System Tray (bottom right-hand corner of the screen), and also check the Startup section of your Start menu to see if any process is running needlessly in the background.

trout

yeah ... disk partitions really can't have that much impact on system performance when you're talking generic apps like MS Word.

I think you have to look hard at the list of active processes, and see what's eating up CPU cycles ... betcha dollars to donuts it's not disk partitions

Has performance degraded slowly over time, or all of a sudden ?

if you notice a lot of disk activity when you experience CPU peaks, it's possible you have disk thrashing caused by low system resources such as RAM, or more likely free disk space on the same drive as your page file.

Passenger

Ok thanks for the input guys. Helped a lot.


I still want to create a single partition hard drive? Or should I leave it as it is? I want to get rid of a partition as I have three and the third isn't doing anything.

liamo

Passenger wrote:

I still want to create a single partition hard drive? Or should I leave it as it is? I want to get rid of a partition as I have three and the third isn't doing anything.

It's your disk. You can do what you like with it.

Although you could use PartitionMagic, it might be messy depending on how much space exists on the other two partitions. Additionally, I don't completely trust PartitionMagic (speaking from experience) to do a perfect job.

I think it would be quicker, cleaner and safer to start from scratch, create a single partition on the disk and re-install your OS. (Having first backed up all your data, of course )

Regards,

Liam

SwampThing

liamo wrote:

I think it would be quicker, cleaner and safer to start from scratch, create a single partition on the disk and re-install your OS. (Having first backed up all your data, of course )

If it's not too much of a pain, I'd agree with liamo. Generally, I'd say have a bash at removing the malware/spyware you more than likely have been infected with. In his case, though, you want to rejig the partitions anyway. You could use Acronis or Partition Magic, but fdisk-ing and reformatting will kill two birds with the one one stone - desired partition and clean install.

Download and burn XP SP2 onto CD before you start. Have your anti-virus software at hand too. Before connecting back to the internet, install both of these. Turn on your firewall! The very first thing when back on the net - Windows Update then anti-virus update.

I re-installed a machine a few months ago - put it on the net without the Windows updates, had a wee surf around, and an hour later I was re-installing it again - malware/spyware/virii galore!!