D: is my system drive in XP

[spanky]

Hi. I set up two partitions on my HDD. The first one is going to be used to store a backup image of the os which is on the second parition. So when I installed XP, it designated the first driver as C: and the second drive that I was installing it on as D:. I was just wondering if not having your system drive as C: will cause any weirdness in the future?

 

[fastco]

The boot drive (with the operating system) has to be the c: drive. The backup image can be anything else.

 

[wildman6801]

It shouldn't but some programs are a little bit fussy over installing on a drive other than c. The reason is because some programs reference the operating system by using the default that is found with Windows. Most programs rely on a system variable like "$windows" "$systempath" to tell them where the operating system and its files are located. I would recommend not to put the operating system on drive d but on drive c. Use drive D as a backup.

Also I wouldn't recommend to partition out a backup off of the main hard drive. I would instead put your backup onto another complete different hard drive because if drive c fails then drive d will as well.

If you don't want to install a second interior hard drive I would suggest to find a cheap USB 2.0 hard drive as a backup. This way you can unplug the drive when not in use further safe guarding your data.

If you don't have a lot of data to back up you may want to try an online backup service such as Mozy which offers a free 2 GB of backup storage. For pay about $50 a year for unlimited storage. Their are others out their as well. If you go with an online backup solution you should have high speed internet like DSL from your phone company or Cable.

 

[spanky]

I back my important data up to a secondary HDD. But I kind of just wanted to have an image of my OS install along with my favorite programs already installed so I could copy over a fresh install whenever I wanted. Data security isn't really the motivation for the image partition, just the convenience of being able to create a fresh system and not having to reinstall programs.

I'm using this method:

http://lifehacker.com/software/geek...rd-drive-with-the-system-rescue-cd-292972.php

I used Gparted to created the partitions and for some reason it just visually makes more sense to me(I'm not sure why though) to have the backup partition at the beginning of the drive and the system drive after that. So that's how I arranged them. So when I installed windows it named them C and D respectively. It seems to work ok, only one of the programs I installed didn't detect that the system drive was d: out of about 6 or 7 programs.

It does seem like it would be better to repartition and reinstall or try to move the partitions around without reinstalling, but I've been working on this computer for like two days and am kind of getting tired of partitioning and installing.

 

[spanky]

I used Gparted to created the partitions and for some reason it just visually makes more sense to me(I'm not sure why though) to have the backup partition at the beginning of the drive and the system drive after that.

Actually, I just remembered my reason for doing it that way. It's because I wanted to start off with a system drive on a partition just big enough to hold the OS and programs that I'd installed. Then after I copy the image over, I wanted to be able to expand the system drive. If I put the backup drive I'd have to leave a big gap to expand the system drive, which I don't guess would really be a bad thing.