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Under you current plan you are tempting the fates to spare you from disaster. Regardless of how many partitions you create you still will have just one drive in your system, and if anything goes wrong with it, you will lose all of it. If you purchased a desktop or tower system, rather than a laptop, I suggest that you buy at least one more hard drive (100 -140GB), and make that the C:\ drive in order to truly isolate your operating system and other windows based applications. Then if your C:\ drive fails, or becomes too infected to repair / recover by other means, you will be able to reformat the C:\ drive, or replace it with a new drive and re-install your operating system and applications, without losing all of your DOS based applications, and more importantly the data you are going to create or migrate over to the new PC. You should have room for 2-3 hard drives, plus the optical drive, at a minimum on a tower or desktop PC. NOTE: A 3.5" hard drive will fit in the floppy drive slot, if you no longer use floppy discs. You might also be able to use external drives for the other dedicated functions you envision. Each time you partition a hard drive you minimize the overall storage capacity on the drive, because the available sectors may be in different partitions.
BTW some of the 64-Bit PC systems, have a virtual 32 bit operating system that runs concurrently with the 64 Bit system , for use with programs not compatible with the 64 Bit environment. If you bought a laptop, you will need external drives to realize the benefits of a multiple drive system, without resorting to partitioning.
Richard Henderson, Archivist
Still Picture Processing Team Special Media Archives Services Division National Archives and Records Administration 8601 Adelphi Rd, MS NWCS-SPPT, Rm 5350 College Park, MD 20740-6001 (301) 837-1802 >>> "Avrom Fischer"
Dear fellow Xywriters (is there a better word) I would appreciate the expert advice from the xylist mavens on where and how to set up Xywrite on a new computer and other advice. I just bought a new pc from dell with 4 gigs of ram, a 250 gig hard drive, and win7 32bit operating system rather than the 64 bit operating system so that I can continue to run Xywrite and other dos programs such as wordperfect and word for word. I intend to partition my hard drive as follows 40 gigs for c: on which I will only install windows and nothing else. 50 gigs for d: on which I will install any windows programs. 40 gigs for E: on which I will install all dos programs along with data from dos programs and pure text files. I will split the remaining space on the hard drive into three approximately equal partitions, one of which I will use to store copies of all my program cd's and drivers. The rest will be for date generated by windows programs in one logical drive and the other for date from internet generated downloads. Would appreciate any suggestions and criticisms. My motive in installing windows on c: and nothing else on C: is that it seems from my experience to reinstall windows is the easiest way besides a system restore for getting rid of virus or other malware. After that I install my other windows programs. this way I have never lost data or my access to dos files So far I have been satisfied to run Xywrite and wordperfect within windows without any need for programs such as tamedos. I very rarely have to go to windows generated material when using Xywrite. I start Xywrite and wordperfect from icons on my desktop in a window and than alt enter to go to a full screen. My only complaint is that exiting is not always smooth and that on startup of Xywrite itself I always get a half screen which I have to alt w to get a full screen. Looking forward to any and all comments, suggestions and criticisms.
Avrom Fischer |