On 17 Nov 99, at 10:28, mjd wrote:

> I have read the facts on partitioning a hard drive, how to, etc.
> Could someone tell me why and when you would want to do this?

  There are three key factors:

1.  Various disk formats may have a maximum volume/partition size.
For instance, using DOS (since about version 3.3) or Win 9x, FAT16
partitions cannot exceed 2GB in size.

2.  Oartition size can affect the efficiency of a format.  For
instance, the larger you make a FAT16 partition, the larger its
"clusters" (also called "allocation units") have to be.  Each file
consists of a whole number of allocation units; on average, the last
one is only half used.  So there is an estimated half a cluster of
wasted drive capacity per file.  The bigger your clusters, the more
wasted space.  [This was a much more important issues when common
drives were less than about 500 MB....]

3.  If you want to run multiple OSes on a single machine, they may
prefer different boot volume formats.

  If you are running a single modern OS on up-to-date hardware, you
may be able to ignore partitioning issues.

David G

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