[Ted]

Pete - looks like you're out of luck on the CD too. If the only reason you want to partition is to make it look "pretty", I can understand that, but it's really not worth the possible troubles. Don't get me wrong. Partitions are not trouble in and of themselves. It's when you have a problem with one (or more) partitions, that you begin to see where the trouble lies. For one, it's harder to recover data from a bad partition than it is from a single partitioned drive. You can think of a drive that has more than one partition as having more "parts". The more parts you have in something, the more than "can" go wrong with it (but not necessarily will).

Originally Posted by TheMamba

That was kind of my point too. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. If you truly have your heart set on having the nice clean partition look, put your Windows XP disc in the drive, boot from the CD and reinstall Windows. It will allow you to partition that drive right before you install. If you're thinking of mucking around with Partition Magic, I'd guess you have enough computer literacy to do the Windows install route too.

And, to the best of my knowledge, the swap file doesn't get fragmented.

Do the Defrag analysis on the drive where your swap file is. See that green patch? That's your swap file.

If I said "you" in that post, I didn't actually mean you, Mamba. Yeah, Windows can do it too, but it's easier to use PM once the OS is installed. Some people just refuse to reinstall Windows unless their life depends on it - and even THEN it's hard for them do actually understand that it sometimes needs to be done.

As for the swap file, true - it doesn't get fragmented, but try telling that to the many people who've argued with me that it does. I just concede and give them that "fact"

At risk of a long debate (that I will not participate in again) - Long story short, no matter how many partitions you have and no matter whether the OS is on it's own partition or not, the arm of the HD has to cover the same ground to store/retrieve data. It doesn't look at which partition it's on. Partitions are only known to the software. In fact, in many instances, the arm has to cover MORE ground to go back and forth between the OS's partition and any of the others, depending on where they physically are located on the HD. Fragmentation occurs at the same rate on many partitions as it does on one.