Idiot newbie needs help here

Zaphod Beeblebrox

Hi guys,

Seeing as a huge pile of crap is building up on my hard disk and everything's running slowly I was thinking about reformatting.
Only problem is it scares the ****e out of me, one reason being I want my upgraded RAM and gfx card to work and another being that when I formatted the hard disk of my last comp it got slower each time not faster.

Basically what I wanna know is, what should I do before formatting to get a successful format? Should I uninstall everything, defrag, scandisk, etc.

The way I've always done it is to back up important stuff on CD-RW, then uninstall everything, run Disk Cleanup, ScanDisk, then go into DOS and type
Format C:
is there anything I'm doing wrong here or is there anything else I should do?

Thanks,
Simon.

SickBoy

These are the steps you should take;

1. Backup anything critical.
2. Fdisk
3. Create partition
4. Format new partition
5. Install OS

Jimmy...

phaxx

All you need to do is backup your stuff, then format the drive, there's no need to uninstall or defrag or anything, all that's doing is nicely sorting your data before you destroy it.

beaver

"one reason being I want my upgraded RAM and gfx card to work and another being that when I formatted the hard disk of my last comp it got slower each time not faster"

What are you on about Re. the graphics card and RAM?

Also, formatting your harddrive is not a holy grail for speeding up your machine. Now if your machine is becoming clogged up with sh|t, then a format and reinstall can be a good idea so you can start afresh.

Have you tried defragging your drive?

Typedef

Yes why not defrag your hdd?

All so if ppl are not so snobbish about unix like idea's, how about you creat a new partition say 250mb and then use this partition and this partition alone as your virtual memory and defrag that regularly?

Some hard core windowz gamers have apparently received speed increases with this so it may be worth considering

GoneShootin

b4 you go and format, which by the way was scary for my first time too, head to the following site :

http://www.sad50.k12.me.us/MSAD50/Thomaston/GVHS/~lindak/diskspeed/

beaver

What's snobbish about swap space? Windows swaps all the time, just generally to your main Windows partition.

If by snobby you mean the ability to comprehend that having a seperate partition for swap might be a good idea... well, then, yeah

Also, if you want significant speed increases on specific applications and you've got the RAM, considerusing a RAMdrive. For example, I set aside about 50 megs of RAM to load Photoshop files into. Runs nice and quickly...

SickBoy

How do you create a RAMDrive under Win2k/XP ??

Zaphod Beeblebrox

Thanks for the help ladz

beaver

I'm using a program called RAMdisk NT...

It's pretty sweet, will automatically load an image into the RAMdrive at startup and dump it back to disk afterwards if you so please...

Zaphod Beeblebrox

Er... sorry me again

I still haven't got round to doing it since I'm still backing up all my incriminating CIA photos of George Bush with a donkey... erm I mean my hardware drivers... and just noticed the comment someone made about creating a small partition and using just that for virtual memory (swap space) making the PC a bit faster.

I remember doing something like that a while ago on another PC but I have the memory of a goldfish. A dead goldfish.
If Typedef (who I think suggested it) or anyone else could tell me how to do this (using FDisk since I'm formatting my drive anyway) I would be your bitch... er I mean be grateful.

PS if I wanted to scandisk or defrag my hard drive would having that kind of partition be a problem?

Cheers.

Typedef

You're my bitch anyway - .....I mean sure I'd love to help

Errm it's been a while since I used dos based fdisk so the below may contain some obvious errors?

If we assume you have booted from boot disk or windowz9x cd

Then you might want to try something like

someprompt:\fdisk
>Y - enable large disk support
option 1
use everything bar 250mb of disk space and set partition to active
create -extended dos partition
create logical in extended dos partition using rest of disk
exit fdisk
reboot
format c: /u
format d: /u

echo /windowz_sux - for performance
echo bill_blowz_sheep

cd e:\win98 or whatever
setup /i /m
once windowz is installed
right click my computer
properties
performance? - or wherever I might actually look at windows when I'm in work tomorrow and tweak this post a bit if there are any obvious errors

set the entire D drive and entire drive only as your "virtual memory" or swap space

/Note
Above may contian errors

astrofool

DO NOT set a 250mb partition at the end of the drive for the swap file, only silly people do that. If you use a big graphics image or open too many programs you'll run out of swap file space.

The swap file being at the end of the drive with the partition will mean the hard drive has to constantly swap between the end and the start of the drive.

'course this might explain why typedef gets all confuddled with Windows, not being able to use it properly can lead to increased tension and eventually hatred of a product

beaver

Anyone who's familiar with the fragmentation/defragmentation process knows that Windows doesn't put data specifically to the start of the drive. So, if we're talking about a disk with only 2 partitions, one for Windows, etc. and one for swap, Windows will not necessarily be flipping between the start and end of the drive when it runs out of swap.

In any case, unless you're a print designer, what are you going to be doing with images that size?

Typedef

Originally posted by astrofool
DO NOT set a 250mb partition at the end of the drive for the swap file, only silly people do that. If you use a big graphics image or open too many programs you'll run out of swap file space.

Well the dudes on lunuxnewbie.org who still for some obscure purpose use windowz seem to swear by this technique, of course I have no knowledge 'where' exactly in the partition scheme the windows swap partition is put by the gamers on lno, but putting it before the windowz partition would leave a 9x system unbootable and putting it in the middle would make 3 partitions would it not? All so, how would the position of the swap partition make a difference to the speed, surely if it were in the middle it would just be swapping between it's current position and the middle of the drive?
The advantage of a swap partition is that you can defrag your swap partition or even format it at will apparently? which speeds up the access times and does not fragment your windows file system, or so the guys on linuxnewbie.org seem to think sooo........?

'course this might explain why typedef gets all confuddled with Windows, not being able to use it properly can lead to increased tension and eventually hatred of a product

Now now, don't be bitchy.

astrofool

this type of thing has gone back years, where people thought putting the swap file on a partition helped, when in fact it did diddly, often reducing performance, and then having a 200meg extra drive there thats not needed.

Modern defragmenters already seperate out the swap file if needed, + the best way to do it is to set a MINIMUM size swap file of 512MB, that way it rarely if ever goes over that limit, stays at the start of the drive so is nice and fast, won't get mixed into other files and folders as it's already got ample space to use, and can expand when needed.

the end of the drive thing is a physical thing, being that it gets slower, less through put, like those cd-rom thingies, which have 48X max on outer track, but 12X on inner tracks, putting one of the most used files in one of the slowest part of the drive makes little if any sense.

Tried it myself once, and things went pear shaped doing any graphical work, so had to set it back to c: anyway.

then again, Linux people must know the best way to use windows, look at you "I can't get Me stable.."

JustHalf

Originally posted by astrofool
then again, Linux people must know the best way to use windows, look at you "I can't get Me stable.."

In fairness, who can? I mean, we keep telling him to get Windows 2000!

Typedef

Who says I don't have a nice warezd version of 2k?

2k is by no means stable, I mean I just love it when a program won't end task and I have to try and log off to get the fscking program to end, especially when this sort of thing does not work don't you?

Oh I forgot you're version of 2k must have been the freak mutagenic version that actually worked

JustHalf

*sigh*

Typedef

yawn.

marauder

I did this on an old 200MHz PPro system I have with 32MB RAM and it works fine.. even runs UT.
IF you can get hold of a copy of partition magic then it can do this stuff for you without having to wipe your disk....

that said I couldn't be arsed doing it on my other systems and anyway, if you forget you have c as swap and d as your main drive and you install something without changing for c: to d: and don't notice it strange things can happen......:eek:

Gerry

Astrofool is quite correct, having swap at the end would be quite harmful to performance. Say if windows is doing something, and it runs out of memory, well whatever about everything else windows usually resides at the start of the disk. So windows could be swapping itself, meaning the disk head has to constantly move between the centre of the disk and the outer edge. A 512 mb swapfile, on the windows partition should be plenty, if you are flush with harddrive space, allocate more.

In win2k you can see in disk defragmenter where the swapfile is, quite nice.