| Although the disk systems described in the preceding section are interesting, especially to power users and system administrators who have multiple drives available, most Windows XP users will end up setting up their systems with standard partitions (that is, basic storage) and the NTFS file format. But what about other file systems? How should you organize multiple disks? What about preparing your disks, and what kinds of strategies should you consider? If you're not going to stick with the straight and narrow of running only NTFS on your hard disk, consider these alternative strategies and rules to follow: Whenever possible, create a separate partition for your data files. This tip has particular relevance to users who test new software or operating systems. If you store your data on a separate partition, reinstalling an operating system is a simple matter of formatting your system partition and starting from scratch. Although you still have to reinstall your programs, using a separate data partition eliminates the need to fuss and ensures you didn't miss a data file somewhere along the line. It also makes backups simple and straightforward. You can do one backup of your system partition; you then need to update this backup only when you add a new device or software program. Data backups can be run on a daily or weekly basis (as determined by how often your data changes) and set to run on your data partition. TIP When you have a data partition in place, right-click the My Documents icon on your desktop, select Properties, and reset the target folder location to your data partition. Resetting it ensures that all your favorites, application settings, and history files are also kept separate from the system partition. (Windows domain network users with roaming user profiles have less to worry about on this score, as their My Documents files are copied to the domain server as well as their local computer.)
Buy a disk image program (such programs are discussed toward the end of this chapter). You can purchase one for less than $75, and it is worth its weight in gold if you like to "tinker" with your system and program configurations. After you have your operating system set up, your principal applications installed, and everything tweaked and configured to perfection, you can create an image of your system on a separate drive or partition. If you need to reinstall your operating system for whatever reason, the complete processfrom beginning to endshould take no more than 20 minutes. Couple this program with the separate data partition discussed in the preceding bullet, and you have a system that you can rebuild from scratch with minimal effort or time loss. When you add, delete, or reconfigure a program, or make changes to the hardware configuration of your disk subsystem, be sure to update your disk image. Some clients I know have gone so far as to buy and install a separate hard drive just for image storage. At $100 or less for a 150GB drive, a hard drive is probably one of the best investments in crash protection you can buy. As a matter of fact, I'm considering making dedicated image drives a standard system configuration for all computers I maintain. If you have more than two IDE hard drives, put both drives on your primary IDE controller and your CD-ROM on the secondary controller. Configuring a system this way puts all the strain on one IDE bus when copying data from drive to drive, but mixing a CD-ROM drive and a hard disk on the same channel is worse. CD-ROM drives transfer data at a much slower rate than hard disks. Mixing fast and slow devices on the same controller forces the controller to run at the slower of the two rates. If you really want good performance with complex drive scenarios (multiple hard disks and CD-R or CD-RW), I suggest that you look into SCSI controllers, serial-ATA setups, or fast ATA controllers. If you want to install Windows XP in a dual-boot configuration with other OSes, please jump over to Chapter 31, "Multibooting Windows XP with Other Operating Systems." There, all the ins and outs of multibooting are discussed along with all the necessary steps.
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