Do you create extra partitions?

[YeOldeStonecat]

Assuming we're talking about workstations/stand alone here...and not servers.

Since 99% of my clients are on business networks...irrelevant question since I redirect their My Docs over to the server..and they run on other shared folders from the server.

But for my own personal home rig...I still partition...or at least..have a 2nd drive, which I have my Docs/libraries moved over to. Just makes for easier upgrades/reinstalls.

But yeah sorta an old practice I supposed stemming from the days of FAT12 and FAT16 primary partitions...that max size for the boot volume.

 

[N E Day Pc Repair]

When I run into that issue of their drive getting too full I suggest they purchase a secondary internal hard drive of equal size or bigger and place an 8gb partition to place a recovery and the rest for storage. I then create a My Programs Folder and reload all their programs there, transfer over the saved data, mods for games etc.

I then remove them all from C: drive and clean it up, defrag, etc. Then I place a sticker (after explaining to them how to do it) at the bottom portion of their monitor in big print saying " Any installs go to i'll use D, but whatever drive letter it is assigned) D:\My Programs. I haven't had any issues with the customers not following the directions since they see it all the time.

Not saying eventually there won't be an issue but the old addage "out of sight,out of mind" comes into play. If I just told them they will mostly forget but if you label it in a place they see it, just like your business sticker on the computer they will remember. Also makes window recovery a lot faster and easier if needed.

 

[NYJimbo]

When I run into that issue of their drive getting too full I suggest they purchase a secondary internal hard drive of equal size or bigger and place an 8gb partition to place a recovery and the rest for storage. I then create a My Programs Folder and reload all their programs there, transfer over the saved data, mods for games etc.

I then remove them all from C: drive and clean it up, defrag, etc. Then I place a sticker (after explaining to them how to do it) at the bottom portion of their monitor in big print saying " Any installs go to i'll use D, but whatever drive letter it is assigned) D:\My Programs. I haven't had any issues with the customers not following the directions since they see it all the time.

Not saying eventually there won't be an issue but the old addage "out of sight,out of mind" comes into play. If I just told them they will mostly forget but if you label it in a place they see it, just like your business sticker on the computer they will remember. Also makes window recovery a lot faster and easier if needed.

Or you could just sell them a larger drive, clone the data from the first drive to the second drive and be done with it.

ps - how do you make a recovery partition ? Are you saying you reload windows from scratch and then create a image of it to the recovery partition ? Or are you just putting some kind of generic image on the partition ? Isn't all of this stuff a hell of a lot of work when you could just sell them a bigger drive and clone it ? Maybe I am missing something here.

 

[14049752]

If you work on many Chinese computers, you'll find that they like four or five partitions on their systems. And new computers sold in stores are set up that way, because it's such a common practice.

And worse, some of the people think it means that their bad hard drive can still be used...because we should just be able to remove the "bad partition".

I always set up just one partition, but will set up as many as are requested of me. It'd have to be a special case for me to recommend two partitions for a common user.

 

[N E Day Pc Repair]

Or you could just sell them a larger drive, clone the data from the first drive to the second drive and be done with it.

ps - how do you make a recovery partition ? Are you saying you reload windows from scratch and then create a image of it to the recovery partition ? Or are you just putting some kind of generic image on the partition ? Isn't all of this stuff a hell of a lot of work when you could just sell them a bigger drive and clone it ? Maybe I am missing something here.

First off I don't have an actual shop yet, my shop is my garage, I only do on average 1-5 computers a week due to my full time job eating my time, that said I tend to try and go above and beyond for my customer's....that's just the way I am as for the recovery partition, it is rather easy its no different than cloning a drive for back up, only slightly different. Doesn't take that much more time and only require's their Windows disk which they should be giving you when you work on their system anyhow

 

[NYJimbo]

First off I don't have an actual shop yet, my shop is my garage, I only do on average 1-5 computers a week due to my full time job eating my time, that said I tend to try and go above and beyond for my customer's....that's just the way I am as for the recovery partition, it is rather easy its no different than cloning a drive for back up, only slightly different. Doesn't take that much more time and only require's their Windows disk which they should be giving you when you work on their system anyhow

I'm just trying to figure out how you are doing a recovery partition. Are you reinstalling windows and then making a image or something else ? I dont see how that is no different than cloning. Just can't understand this process.

 

[anonymous Mac Tech]

I personally have my drive in my MBPro split in half to two boot volumes (actually three, if I add into consideration 10.8 installs it's own recovery slice). One side running 10.6.8 and the other running 10.8.2 so I can run both OSX volumes natively for a variety of reasons.

For customers it is usually never more than one partition unless they want a bootcamp partition for Windows or unless it's a server.

 

[N E Day Pc Repair]

I'm just trying to figure out how you are doing a recovery partition. Are you reinstalling windows and then making a image or something else ? I dont see how that is no different than cloning. Just can't understand this process.

You can either clone the drive and make the recovery or use the Windows cd to make a "fresh start " clean recovery


Example- http://techtips.salon.com/create-restore-partition-24732.html