Hard Drive Partitions for Operating Systems and Gaming
06.27.06 - 09:11pm
I feel that I have neglected the gamer within me lately. This has mainly been due to this website consuming every spare second from my life. I did however have a chance to fire up a game of Serious Sam 2 the other day when I was severely stressed out and I noticed how terrible this game played on my machine. My desktop has been converted from a gaming machine to a web development and distributed computing machine so I have over 30 processes running with tons of crap running when I’m not even using it. Now there are multiple ways to go about fixing this issue and I am going to highlight my personal favorite, hard drive partitions.
Hard drives are the slowest piece of machinery in a computer. With access times measured in milliseconds, those spinning disks are hundreds of times slower than system memory. When compared to processor cache, hard drives start to look like obsolete pieces of machinery. However hard drives do have one thing going for them. While RAM can cost around $50 per gigabyte, hard drives average around 30 cents per gigabyte. This cheap price for storage is what keeps hard drives around, there is nothing cheaper with similar access times than these slow spinning disks.
Partitions
Depending on your operating system you may or may not be familiar with partitions. For those that aren’t, imagine that the backyard for your house is an acre. Now what if you want to split this backyard so half of it can feed goats and the other half children can play in? You would simply put a fence down to separate the yard in two. With hard drives you can do the same thing. If you have a 200 GB drive, you could split it in half so that one half contains your operating system and the other half contains critical data. While this may sound great, there are some limitations and downsides to partitioning out your hard drive.
The most important feature with partitioning is the fact that you can separate portions of your hard drive. In separating this portions, if one part of the drive fails, all the other parts will not be corrupted and this will minimize data loss. Now the downside to this partitioning is the fact that now you have double the amount of drives to traverse with a same amount of heads on the hard drive. This can become a noticeable problem when you try to transfer data from one partition to the other. The head on your hard drive will be whizzing back and forth as the drives cache fills up and essentially doubles the work being done by the drive. Now if you take the correct precautions and follow the correct procedures you may never notice this and hard drive partitions could become a great tool for you to use.
Partitions for Operating Systems
This is where I find partitions to hold their true potential. Just for a second think of how many processes you have running on your machine at this moment. If it is over 20 then your machine is probably running a lot of junk that isn’t necessary for gaming. One note, while I am focusing on gaming, this can be applied to any particular task that does not require any extraneous tasks running such as java, iTunes, Acrobat reader, etc. On a fresh install of Windows XP SP1 I can get the machine down to around 15 running processes and around 120MB of ram for the Operating System. When comparing this to my bloated “daily” install with 39 processes and nearly 250 MB used up in background processes and programs I think you get the picture. When it comes to gaming, you want as many resources as possible devoted to that game. The more resources available the more frames you can generate and the better the game will look.
Now to get started with partitioning out your drive, note that you will need to have a clean drive to do this. If you are going to use your current hard drive for this then you should back up all your data on a transferable medium such as a flash drive or perhaps another hard drive. Once you have your drive you should then make a decision on how you will divide the drive. I usually reserve 20 to 30 gigabytes for the gaming drive and the remainder goes towards my work drive, you should decide for yourself how much space you need for your operating systems. You will be installing your operating system twice so make sure you have enough time to do this. Since I am very familiar with Windows XP, I will be illustrating how I go about doing this in Windows.
Installation
Begin by inserting your XP disc and loading into the Windows Installer. When you are asked which drive you would like to use to install your operating system, choose to create a partition and enter the size you desire for your first partition. Then instead of continuing, perform the same action and use up the remainder of the drive. Now that you have two separate partitions, begin installing XP. Once the installation process has completed, perform the same process except on the second drive. Once you have completed this second installation, upon reboot you will be shown a screen where you will be able to select an operating system to boot into. First things first, you will want to make a way to differentiate between the two operating systems as you will be originally presented with two Microsoft Windows XP Professional to chose from. To change the name of your installation, right click on My Computer, select properties. Under the Advanced tab, click settings under Startup and Recovery. Under System startup you will want to click Edit. This will open up your Boot.ini file in which you can change the name of the operating system. Be very careful here, if you mess this up you could potentially render your installations inaccessible. Carefully change the two partitions to names you will recognize and save the file. In the end your boot.ini file should look similar to what I have shown below.
Once you have this sorted out, begin fleshing out your installations with the various drivers and programs each one needs. This can be the most time intensive part, I generally copy all the stuff that I need to install on both partitions to my data drive so that I can access the executables without having to pop discs into the DVD-ROM drive. Once you have both operating systems up and running you can begin tweaking your gaming partition.
MSCONFIG
This is probably one of the best things you can tweak for your operating system. From the Start menu, select Run and enter “MSCONFIG” and hit OK. In the Startup tab you can really trim all the fat off your operating system and keep it running as smoothly as possible. For my gaming partition I shutdown everything that isn’t necessary for Windows to operate. Once you have trimmed down the Startup tab, move over to the Services tab. Here are all the background services that your computer loads up and you can easily save yourself a few megabytes of ram by trimming this area down. While the list of stuff to disable would be too great for me to list here, you can use this website to see if a service is necessary. Once you have finished tweaking these two tabs, make sure in the General tab that Selective Startup is selected and then reboot. Upon reboot you should notice a moderate decrease in the number of processes running and the total memory usage.
Between a fresh install and these tweaks you should notice a moderate increase in your frames per second while gaming. I will try to assemble a more complete guide of XP tweaks to compliment this partition guide but that is for another time. I hope this helps some people understand this topic, when utilized correctly partitions can be very helpful.
There is an easier and way more efficient way to do this. Instead of installing WinXP twice on two different partitions, you could set up two hardware profiles. One for gaming and one for general usage. Then, on each bootup you have to choose which profile to use.
Hardware profiles (they have nothing to do with hardware) define what services will be started on boot. This is managed from within “services.msc”. After creating the hardware profile, you can go ahead and edit each and every service and bind them to specific profiles.
Also, you could create a partition for gaming data, and install all your games under that partition and keep it defragmented.
That is indeed another way to go about performing this task however I personally don’t believe it to be the most effective when trying to maximize the efficiency of Windows. The purpose of having two seperate partitions is that all the data necessary to game would be kept on a single partition and that the entire Windows installation would be keep to a bare minimium. While manually editing the services.msc can help optimize Windows by cutting down on the bloat, you still don’t remove any of the data bloat by having the same OS used for both situations.
In regards to having a seperate gaming partition for just gaming data that defeats the purpose of having multiple seperate partitions. Instead of having the hard drive access the entire data from a single partition while gaming, you will be forcing it to access both the Windows partition and the gaming data partition. Perhaps I should try to perform some benchmarks to highlight these various sitatutions but this would have to wait till I build my new system as my current 3D card is rather underpowered. Thanks for the great idea, for those that haven’t got the space to install two copies of an OS this would be a great alternative.
hello,
i have been reviewing your advice on similar threads and unfortunately none has covered my particular problem. My second disc drive (E) has entirely vanished from view. i am assuming it is still in their somewhere and that it might be otherwise inhabited by irritating life forms of the spyware kind since my anti virus has stopped running correctly and strange things are amiss…. of course i am completely computer daft and despised by all of computerdom. Never the less… the drive does not appear in the disc management section of :My Computer and i am at a loss as to what to do from there… have you any other ideas? i did download some programs of the net intended to tweak and tune up the computer awhile before this problem started perhaps that has affected it? However i cannot access any of these programs to either delete or restore since they are coincidently located in the E drive… is there any help for me?
thanks so much for any ideas and advice you might have,
sleepless in cyberspace :)
Hi,
i build computers as a hobby and the most common reason for drives to be invisible is lack of power, installing a more powerful power supply will in 95% of cases cure this problem.
Hi,
I have read the article and have a question. Could I install Win 98 SE on one partition to be used for games and then Win XP SP2 on another to be used for internet etc..??
My games are a few years old and they are all I play.
Problem: Vista Business: Many Gaming (and other) issues.
Hard drive is partitioned (C; and D) D drive was originally XPPro but was taken over by Vista during a series of installation issues.
My objective is to activate the D drive and re-install XP Pro there for gaming and media. M only other alternative is buy another hard drive and put XP Pro there…rather not if I can do it in the partition (300 GB split in half).
Comments on what I may expect or problems I could avoid appreciated.
Not sure if this is the right thread but I just discovered that I cannot access either of my DVD/CD-ROM drives. They do not show up on the My Computer list and when I load a disk nothing happens. Please help or direct me to where I can get help.
Question. I have 2 HDD’s, and I would liek to install Windows on the beginning of the first HDD, with the gaming partition on the beginning of the second. Based on what Chris Morrell said, would this improve framerates and overall performance of gameplay on the occasion that both HDD’s will be working simultaneously instead of having to juggle between two partitions on the same HDD? Also, would this setup work better than having all games installed in the same partition as Windows? I’ve been fighting with myself about this issue for quite some time, and despite how much I look on the internet, I can’t seem to find an answer. Thanks.
Not including the pagefile, Windows itself doesn’t read/write to the Window’s directory very often outside besides when it boots and shutsdown. I personally keep each partition and it’s relative data in a single partition for ease of use when having to figure out what goes where. In theory you could create two partitions on your first drive which would contain your operating systems and then create a second partition at the beginning of the drive for your game files which would take advantage of the outer portions of the disk having slightly faster read/writes but that would be the only advantage. Within the Task Manager you can tell it to show how many read/writes each process is performing, you’ll rarely see Windows perform more than a few megabytes compared to gigabytes of transfers for games. So in theory you should see some slightly faster load-times but you’d just add more complexity to the system. If you have two drives and you want to dedicate them to gaming then I’d suggest checking out creating a RAID1 setup as it’ll significantly boost your read-throughput on the drives while giving you a fail-safe in case a drive dies. Nothing helps more though with gaming than slimming down the amount of stuff running in the background, especially if you are RAM limited.