Blue screen of death

[siblues]

I have an older Dell xps 400 running XP.I was just wondering if someone could explain how the hard drive needs to be partitioned.I know that from the factory it has two partitions a very small partition and the large partition that the os is installed on.I need to know how big to make the smaller partition.I was working on the pc and and it gave me the blue screen and now it wont start back up.It loads to the windows splash screen but will never finish loading.I am going to erase the whole hard drive and reinstall everything from scratch.Thanks

 

[Archean]

Have you tried to boot into safe mode? You can try that by Pressing F8 key, just as the system POST is complete. If the system boots in to safe mode, go to C:\windows\minidump, and see whether memory dump from that BSOD is recorded, if so, please attach it with your next post.

The 'smaller' partition on your HDD may be contain 'restore' partition from dell, which contains OS/other software which came pre-installed with it. So, I wouldn't advise you to get rid of it, unless it is not working due to some issue.

 

[siblues]

That partition is long gone I have reformatted this drive two or three times a few years ago.My problem is no matter what I do the pc wouldnt start up so I had to start from scratch and now I dont know the proper way to partition the drive.I know how to partition it but how do you decide the size of the partition?

 

[Archean]

Well if you are going to install XP (which is upgraded to SP3, or you may use an slip streamed xp setup cd) + office apps + multimedia apps (i.e. video + audio player etc.) + web apps (e.g. browsers) + AV & Firewall + Email Client (if you use any), then you should set atleast 80GB+ for the bootable partition, because you may need/or want to install more stuff later on.

You'd also want to decide how you want to store your data, i.e. audio/video files, documents or any other files. Usually what I do is, keep all these files away from system partition, plus side is whenever I decide to reinstall everything I don't really have to bother about my data, because it is already on another location. So keeping in mind this theory , right now I have one partition for OS/Software, one for Videos, one for games, one for my documents/data, one for general, and a secondary hdd for backup.