TechTip: Partition Your Hard Drive

Everyone likes "Joe", but it seems he installs a veritable pleathera of viruses and malware at least once every year, and I have to clean up the mess. His computer literally is his movie theater, jukebox, messenger, shopping mall, and bank. Thus, he is desperate without it. Lately there has been a nasty Trojan (not the condom, but computer malware) floating around the Internet which disguises itself as "Anti-Virus 2009". A rash of annoying and scary pop-ups warn Joe that the computer is infected with spyware an must download their product to scan and remove the virus. The virus has been known to wipe out "System Restore" and produce the infamous "blue screen of death" when trying to reboot. Most of the time, the only remedy is to format the hard drive that contains the Windows installation and perform a fresh install of the operating system. When you re-install Windows or perform a factory recovery, all pictures, mp3s, videos, internet favorites, emails, address book, games, and programs are LOST. Joe has to start from scratch! What lessons can we learn from Joe?

If you care about you data, keep it safe. Here's how:

Partition your hard drive. (do what????)
Think of it as figuratively cutting your C: drive into two separate and independent parts. One part will have the Windows installation, and the other part will have all your data.

When you install Windows on a PC, select the option to do a full format deleting all current partitions that exist (there likely is only one). Then you will have the opportunity to create partitions and designate the size of each. I recommend using C: for the Windows partition and setting to at least 10 GB. So, if you have a 100GB hard drive, you can set your D: partition to be 90 GB which is plenty of space for pictures, videos, and music.

Here's the really cool part: Once Windows is installed and you open "My Computer", you'll have 2 local discs (C: and D:). If Windows gets corrupted somehow or if you get a virus, all you need to do is format the partition housing Windows, not the D: drive with all your data. C: gets formatted (erased), Windows re-installed, and nothing happens to D: where you saved all your files! Just remember to always save your stuff to the D: drive.

In the next installment of TechTips, I'll show you the fine art of backing up email, your address book, and internet favorites.