Swapfile Question?

kinda the way I pictured it. Internal fragmentation shouldn't be an option.

Okay another theory in my quest for ideal settings. First, does fdisking a hard drive with 98 boot disk cause any problems with installing W2K on an NTFS partition? meaining, if I create the partition in the FDISK and convert it to NTFS, is that bad?

If not, here is my ideal setting for W2k computer. (please correct my mistaken beliefs if so) Partition HD into small, 3-5 G, Fat32 partition to be win98 install. The rest, create as extended partition 2 that is to be formatted NTFS in the W2k install. Format partion 1 to have just 98 system files, format c: /s, and then install W2k. (this gives the option of later installing 98 if needed.) Then set the W2k swap file on C:. It is near beginning of drive, it is fat32 (faster access than NTFS?) and you won't run into the problem we just discussed when deleting and re-enabling the swap.

Thoughts?:bor:

Ok, so you want to leave the C drive as FAT32 and for only the swapfile??

Your OS will run faster off the primary partition....

C drive has win98 system files in case I need to load Win98 in the future. That is the primary reason, but I was thinking this would work well with the swap also.

BUT, you say there is a performance gain with the OS on the primary partition? Can I ask why?

It is unlikely the user will ever go back to 98, but I like to hedge my bets. With 98 system files already there, I wouldn't have to re-partition. So convince me otherwise. :confused:

Thanks for the bits of wisdom

Quote:

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Originally posted by Tr!une
C drive has win98 system files in case I need to load Win98 in the future. That is the primary reason, but I was thinking this would work well with the swap also.

BUT, you say there is a performance gain with the OS on the primary partition? Can I ask why?

It is unlikely the user will ever go back to 98, but I like to hedge my bets. With 98 system files already there, I wouldn't have to re-partition. So convince me otherwise. :confused:

Thanks for the bits of wisdom

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I've never set it up like, that, so I can only speculate...however, with 98 system files on your primary partition, I think 2k or XP will bring up the boot menu, unless you remove 98 from the boot.ini. As for the performance gain/loss in having the OS on a secondary partition...I'm going on the idea that since the dawn of computer time, the system has booted from the primary hdd, unless there is information on the primary partition telling the system to look for the command interpreter and other files on a different partition, true? Without doing some serious benchmarking and testing myself, I could neither confirm or deny the actual results of booting from a secondary partition. What I can confirm is the ease of salvaging the system with all OS related files on the primary partition and user related files on secondary partitions. I have wiped and reloaded many times recently (bad optical drive jacking up installations) with no hitches in recovering all of my old settings, and all i had to do was boot from the cd and do a clean install.

Also, you shouldn't have to re-partition to install the OS. A simple format c: should suffice. Having the 98 system files on the drive just takes up space, because they are for an OS you won't be using...the only thing you might be able to do is boot to a DOS prompt if you have it set up in the boot.ini.

BUT, you say there is a performance gain with the OS on the primary partition? Can I ask why?

Laws of Physics!! The drive spins a constant speed, however the tracks get longer and longer from the center out. Sorta like a record. To see a graphical benchmark download and run demo of HDTACH

Quote:

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Originally posted by Tr!une
C drive has win98 system files in case I need to load Win98 in the future. That is the primary reason, but I was thinking this would work well with the swap also.

BUT, you say there is a performance gain with the OS on the primary partition? Can I ask why?

It is unlikely the user will ever go back to 98, but I like to hedge my bets. With 98 system files already there, I wouldn't have to re-partition. So convince me otherwise. :confused:

Thanks for the bits of wisdom

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I think this one has gone off of topic, however I will indulge.

Realistically, none to a very nominal performance gain will be noted if you run your OS from the one partition on a drive or another.

Additionally, to put a swap file on a different partition from the OS is helpful in preventing fragmentation from dynamic resizing, provided that nothing else is being done with this partition.

To see a real gain from a relocated swap file is to move it to an equally fast different hard drive; and a different controller/different drive would show slight increase better still.

I have been playing around with using a RAM drive for swap space.

I first became interested in RAM drives when several years ago. A coleague told me about his Mac that ran a RAM drive large enough for the an image of the hard drive. That was when 540Mb drive was big...

HyperOS offers something similar but only for the Win9x series, the problem is that HyperOS is very expencive, and these days you need 1 to 2Gb of RAM for it to work.

My laptop only has 512Mb of RAM so I have been trying out "Cenatek RamDiskNT" but I still don't have enough RAM for the swap file. I have got it set-up a 50Mb RAM drive for my browser temp files...

It's a shame the MS hasn't followed Linux and have a seperat partition for the swap file and put it at the begining of the drive.

PS sorry about the spelling...

MS OSes nowadays let the user (or administrator) set the swapfile and pretty much all of the environment variables to anything one wants (not guaranteeing it will work, but you CAN change it). In other words, as long as you're comfortable with working with the registry, or you can find an app similar to TweakUI(is Tweakui still updated?? never bothered to check...) you can set up Windows to be very much like Linux, using a separate partition for swap, users, etc...an interesting idea for a project, if I can ever afford to get a spare box for playing with...

Norton Speed Disk used to give you a fixed swap file at the begining of the drive, very usful but it dosen't appear to do it on XP with it's latest verson...

Quote:

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Originally posted by Ya_know
I think this one has gone off of topic, however I will indulge.

Realistically, none to a very nominal performance gain will be noted if you run your OS from the one partition on a drive or another.

Additionally, to put a swap file on a different partition from the OS is helpful in preventing fragmentation from dynamic resizing, provided that nothing else is being done with this partition.

To see a real gain from a relocated swap file is to move it to an equally fast different hard drive; and a different controller/different drive would show slight increase better still.

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I too will indulge ... :rolleyes: :D .

This is all o/s & hardware dependant. Different o/s, different memory handling, different disk handling, different disks - different file allocation lists, different device response times, different seek & latency times, different controller response times, loads of bloomin' differencies.... so there's no one answer.....

Generally though swapfile wants to be on a different channel(on another disk!) on the same controller if there are multiple disks. But no swap file at all is best, so fill it up with ram....

Oh & don't use all that ram for a ram disk, that's why you have a fancy o/s, if you want to do that go back to dos, then it will be fast but not so compatible....

By the way windows doesn't care how much ram you have it'll always use your swap file. This is a design flaw in my book. If you used a RAM driver that told the OS that it wasn't a RAM Drive, but a physical hard disk then you should be able to put your swap file on that partition. I think windows performance would improve markedly. I keep waiting for an OS to store the FAT Tables in RAM (assuming you have enough space). As for not storing the Swapfile on the primary partition, windows 2000 allows this, but there are drawbacks. I can't comment on what they are since SP3, but in the past a dialog would appear saying that certain things couldn't be debugged if you didn't have your pagefile on your boot drive. This once again is a design flaw. It could have also been that issues were created with hibernation. I'm sorry it's a little fuzzy, but i do recall having problems and having to move my pagefile back to C:. I think I also tried putting parts of the pagefile on different drives and even though the cumulative size was enormous it would tell me I was out of virtual memory even though I wasn't. This could also have been an issue related to having a mixed Fat32, NTFS, and Fat16 environment. Who knows? Furthermore like I said many of these issues may have cleared up since SP3. I can simply tell you one thing, you'll avoid a whole lot of headaches if you just KISS: Keep it simple stupid and keep it on C:\.
Good Luck,
Christian

About going back to windows 98. I highly doubt you'll ever feel like doing that. Why don't you make a list of your applications and head on over to one of my favorite websites NT Compatible and see which of your applications if any won't work with Win2K. Even if they won't work you can always use virtual PC or VMWare as multiboot alternatives.

One major problem with multiboot configurations is that programs can see files on other OS partitions. Suppose you have C: for Win98 and D: for WIn2k. Some win2k apps installer will detect a copy of windows at C:\Windows and install it's files there instead of D:\WINNT where they should be. This is more likely in the freeware/amatuer sector, but don't think this doesn't happen with professional software too. I can think of tons of installer bugs that'd make your head spin. Like Learn to Speak Spanish 7 which detects an NT platform and then says nope you don't Sp3 or higher so you can't run this application. The trouble was I didn't have NT 4 or Sp3 or higher, I had win2K gold, Sp1, or Sp2 and of course none of those are Sp3. So the programmers were idiots and didn't account for the possibility (100%) that users would try to install that application on a future OS that wasn't Sp3 and had a different version #.

The moral of the story is the fewer customizations you make the better things will work. Sometimes, okay often, it's annoying to keep things mainstream, but your apps will work better that way guaranteed. For example I for one hate C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\My Documents\, but I'm sure I'm taking a risk by changing it to D:\. Sometimes these changes are necessary, but recall that you are taking a risk.

My advice is to install Win2K to your primary partion, put your swapfile in the same place and worry about something else in life. If you want good disk performance, just buy a raid controller and be sure TO DO IT BEFORE INSTALLING ANY OS! Because afterwards is too late. Windows 2000 and higher no longer accept changes in IDE Controllers (which is bloody ridiculous) so if you get a new motherboard or a RAID controller and you want to boot off of it without re-installing windows you're dreaming!

I've seen workarounds, but don't get your hopes up, they're configuration specific, which means they'll only work if your new IDE controller is exactly the same as theirs. Every file, every registry entry, and every other setting would need to match perfectly.

Is it just me or should Microsoft spend two weeks to a month of their drive interface developers' time and add the necessary code to allow their power users the right to upgradability



Okay Rantus Endus :)

Good Luck,
Christian