Topic: Drive Name Change?

[Kaz]

Hi Everyone,
Ok I now have my new 500gig hard drive installed in 3 partitions (wouldn't let it do more than 205g per partition) so I now have 2 x205g and 80g drive great!, but it has change the name of my drives (except the C drive) how do I change the drives back to the way they were before.  My C drive is still my C drive I now have an E drive and J drive I know I can rename the drive ie Acer (E) but I actually want to change to Drive name itself from E to Acer D any help on this would be great

[Rik]

Hi Kaz

Assuming XP, right-click on My Computer and select Manage, then select Disk Management. There you can allocate the new drive letters by right-clicking on the drive and choosing Change Drive Letters and Paths. Finally, right-click on the drive, choose Properties and you can name the volume.

[Kaz]

Wow! Yes XP
Thank you so much Rik Bean just great 

[Sandra]

I am puzzled as to why it wont let you partition in any size you want ?
I have a couple of 500 gig drives, one in XP and one in Vista and they both formatted as a single partition of the full drive size 

What message did you get, if any, when you tried to create a bigger partition ?

[Kaz]

Hi Sandra,
My computer guy said it wouldn't let him make a partition any bigger than 205g and it's an ''Acer thing'' did you know that my Acer has another C drive that your not suppose to know about??

[Rik]

Acer often/usually supply machines with a hidden partition to restore Windows from, Kaz, is this what you're referring to?

[Kaz]

Hi
I emailed my computer Man and this is what he said

The partition size seemed to be governed by PMagic, when you resize the partition in the program it allows you to drag the slider across to make the partition bigger. For some reason it only allowed me to make them 200gb. The hidden partition is a boot partition created by Acer. Some manufacturers do that, I think Dell do as well. I think it's in FAT32 instead of NTFS. It's probably not a good idea to have really big partitions anyway.

[Rik]

The Acer partition will be FAT, to judge by what I've seen.

Everyone has their own idea on partitions. Traditionally, I've partitioned C/D/E for System/Apps/Data. That has made backing up easier for me. I tend to use about 50GB for C & D, the balance for E.

My notebook is partitioned this way on a single drive (though not 50GB...). One desktop machine has one drive split to C/D and the second as E (200GB), while this machine has fast 80GB drives for C/D with a 750GB E, and an internal backup drive at F, also 750GB. Using NTFS throughout, I've not seen a problem with the partition size. With the separate physical drives for C/D, I switch the swap file onto D.

[Sandra]

Apart from a partition for the OS, I use 40 gig for XP and 60 gig for Vista, I leave the rest of the boot drive and any other drives as a single partition the maximum remaining size of the boot drive and the maximum size of any other drives.

I just make lots of folders and subfolders, thats probably left over from the days of 2gig partitions on drives and you would sometimes have a couple of hundred mbs spare on each of 3 or 4 partitions and not be able to use it for something that was 350mb, even though you possibly had a gig or more spare in total across the partitions