Optimizing Disk Space, safe minimum for XP.

[khakisheep]

Hi all,

I've been working on a project for a while now where I'm setting up many partitions all with XP installed on them. Please check out my original thread for info on what I'm up against.

My Project

I'm at a point now where I'm at drive letter Z and about to push beyond those boundaries and see what happens. But first I have some housekeeping to attend to on my test HDD here. I have lots of extra space on my previous installs, according to how large drivers were for the model I was working with. In attempts to optimize this space, I'm using Partition Magic 8.0 and am going to shrink all previous partitions and gain some extra space on my drive. My only question I'm hoping someone might be able to give me a heads up on is whats the minimum I should shrink these without causing me grief later. Partition Magic has a minimum that it will shrink each partition to. I'm sure this is according to some grand idea of Windows wanting at least some free space left for it to spawn and do happy blue screen things. So question, am I at risk going too low? Is there a quotable set amount XP says it needs somewhere free? Also if anyone's done anywhere near this much partition re-sizing before feel free to offer up some tokens of wisdom. I'm a bit afraid of each of these re-sizes having to move the following 22 partitions up in their respective pecking orders. Looking back re-sizing each install once it was complete was probably my best bet. But horror stories and comments on re-sizing are appreciated.

Thanks in advance,

Ksheep

 

[poertner_1274]

Are you planning on doing any updates or such with it? I know if you want to update each one to SP2 you will need more space, than you would if you just want the bare bones setup. I also think SoulHarvester got his installs down to about 700MB. Search around our site for that thread.

BTW
:wave:Welcome to TechSpot:wave:

 

[khakisheep]

There will be no updates done to this partition. They will not ever have a need to have anything else added to them. As of now I'm leaving 300mb of space at the end of each partition just because it seems safe to me. Re-sizing each partition is taking quite a while though, however as I said I'm hesitant to have it resize and move all 22 partitions at once. PM seems quite easy to upset when you ask it to sequentially do something to more than 1 partition at once. At least this is my experience.

 

[poertner_1274]

I'd suggest once you get this done to ghost the entire drive and back it up on another HDD this way you will always have a copy of the HDD when this one dies from all this screwing around with it

 

[IronDuke]

...I also think SoulHarvester got his installs down to about 700MB...

Oh dear, Ooops!!

 

[Samstoned]

All I come up with is 1.5gb of hard drive space to safely install.
don't get exactly what this is about (driver test??)
you can look at xp embedded ,takes up way less room
loads only drivers needed
like I have seen some linux as small has 128mb

 

[khakisheep]

I'd suggest once you get this done to ghost the entire drive and back it up on another HDD this way you will always have a copy of the HDD when this one dies from all this screwing around with it

I have serveral back-ups of my main drive. And I never test something new on it, always on a backup drive first to see that it does or doesn't work. I left Partition Magic running last night and set it up to resize and move all my partitions at once and it did beautifully. I expected blue screens this morning when I returned but it performed well. I went ahead and shrank all partitions down to the minimum that PM suggests and thus far, have seen no dire problems from doing this either. Most have between 100-150mb of space left on them, and since no additions are forseen I'm happy with salvaging all the space I can from each partition. I'm only dealing with a 200gb HDD at the moment and that might be my limit since that is the largest HDD we currently have available.
Along with my current HDD limitations, I'm also limited in that I have to deal with what software I currently have available. So XP embedded is out. And yes, the ultimate drive behind this project is stand alone partitions of XP, 150+ in the end, each with corresponding drivers and testing for each individual motherboard. I'll continue updating here with progress as my number of partitions increases. Wish me luck.