I was trying to reinstall xp on my gaming comp and wiping the hard drive
i allready formatted and reistalled 98 and xp
the problem is : it left me with only a 3 gb fat 32 C:drive for some reason (':shock:') i can't seem to reach the rest of my 74 gb drive
well now i got the funny feeling i could use some sugestions from other people.
my target was having a small fast fat32 part of my HD for mechwarrior and os and a big slow one for other stuff
btw while on subject can someone tell me how to asign the fastest part of my HD for virtual memory and other stuff?

W00t found my mistake , but can somebody tell me how to find and asign stuff to the fastest part of a harddisc

With only one hard drive being used for Windows, your swapfile, programs, and games, there's no real benefit to be gained from doing this. That said, by default WindowsXP automatically does it when the drive has been idle for awhile. I don't know how long "awhile" is, nor can I find the setting at the moment; I always turn it off. (= Just leave your computer on overnight, and that ought to do the trick.

Start/Control Panel/System/Advanced tab/Performance Settings/Advanced tab/Virtual Memory Change

With only one hard drive broken up into multiple partitions, it is recommended not to move the pagefile to any partition other than the one the OS is on. You'll actually slow things down. If you have multiple physical hard drives, it's another story.

That setting isn't just for relocating the swap file, Wad - it's also for changing the size of it, and changing the way Windows manages it. In Win98, you could get a significant performance boost on some systems by making the swap file a fixed size, instead of the constantly variable size it is when Windows manages it. (and just takes what it needs at any given time)

Not as big a deal with WinXP as it was with Win98, but some people still like to lock it down.

*sticks thumbs in ears - waggles fingers*

*thbbbbbt*

Yeah yeah, but that's not what he was asking. (=

You're right, though. I've always kept my swapfile at a fixed size.

Win9x's FAT/FAT32 filesystem has a very sequential style, block look up table to find files scattered about the disk. NTFS has a better indexing system to find fragmented files, hence that performance difference. The reason to lock the swap file down is to prevent it from being fragmented as badly.

But Win-NT/2K/XP can get a performance gain from this little tip. Be sure to run no programs while doing this and it is helpful to kill anything that starts at boot that you do not need.

- Boot the system up and set the swap file to fixed and 0, now reboot.

- Run the disk defragmenter several times, reboot.

- Run disk degragmenter one more time. Now set the swap file to 100-150% of your memory size but be sure to set it as fixed. The size of swap depends on how much real memory you have and how many apps you tend to run concurrently (thus needing more memory). Once you have set swap, reboot.

If you run disk defrag again but only to analyze the disk you will see that swap is one large, concurrent file and it will stay that way. This will greatly increase your system speed for the long term.

Or if you have loads of RAM, make a ramdisk and set the swapfile to that

thx for advice everyone.

That would be rather ineffiecient as you are basically loading an application to emulate disk in memory. Just turn off your swapfile.

Ramdisk is best used to emulate a disk partition where the application (/root in *nix for init, or an NFS mount) specifically wants a disk or it will error out and you have no disk available or do not want to use disk because the host system uses a different formatting that you do not want to disturb. Aka, running Knoppix or PicoBSD from CD or floppy on a system with Windoze loaded on it.

hmm...i did reinstall the whole system but ive encountered a new possible problem... in the bios i choose to not skip some tests like it normally does ,
now when it boots it does a memory test on my 1 gig 2100 ram that just loops i don't have a good feeling about this and appears it tests the ram allot slower compared to my older comps sd ram.