I’ve had a quick look on a couple of other threads, but feel I need the knowhow of John Foss of similar unicycling “techie”
I have a PC running XP and am having great difficulty trying to install a game for my son (World of Warcraft, if it matters). The problem I have is that there is not enough space on my C drive.
After reading some other threads on this matter, I have found some info in Disk Management (thanks Phil):
Disk 0 is made up of C and D drives -
C is 27.95GB NTFS Healthy (system), primary partition
D is 83.84GB NTFS Healthy, extended partition, logical drive
SO, can I load the game on to the D drive and play it from there, or is this drive just for file storage?
OR, do I need to pop the D drive into the C drive (as I understand Phil suggested in an earlier thread) and then put the game on to it?
On another, similar, matter if I store my files on the D drive I notice that they not protected from any other user mucking around with (or even deleting) my stuff as they are not protected by my user password. I tried encrypting the files, but can still access them from my children’s user accounts (not administrators). I’m fully prepared to discover that I’m missing something painfully obvious!:o
Sorry for the long post. I promise I’ll get back on my uni soon.
I thought World of Warcraft as many other MMORPG’s needed to have FAT32 file systems to work properly. FAT32 although sloppy on a harddrive is what most games go by.
I’m not 100% sure on that but all I know is everytime I loaded up windows I was told never to use the NTFS file system unless its for business reasons.
I set up partitions on my hard drive for specific purposes, and the C partition is for system and program files…so it doesn’t get filled up like that. 30 gigs is the size of my C partition, it’s half full, after a year…and it’s on a 300 g drive.
In your situation, you might do some thinking about what’s on the different partitions, if some stuff could easily be moved to D and make enough room for wow, then do that. Or you could install wow on D and be done with it, should work just fine.
I’m pretty sure that most of the space on the C drive is being taken up by programs, and by far the most of that is WoW. It seems to me that loading WoW onto the D drive and running it from there is the easiest option.
I’ve just noticed that my external hard drive that I use for work is a FAT32 file system. Could my son run WoW from an external drive, or does it need to be loaded into the PC system?
Put it on the D drive. If it works, then all is good.
As for NTFS v. FAT32. The filesystem is independent from the software and only the OS needs to know how to interact with it (unless it’s a utility app), so it should make no difference on compatibility. Performance may be an issue, however, NTFS may be only marginally slower for some things. NTFS is the newer filesystem and supports many more features, such as data integrity, encryption, and compression, so it’s best for important data.
An external drive may be just as fast as an internal drive, and maybe even faster if it’s a larger newer hard drive. The speed is most dependent here on the way it’s being connected. USB, Firewire, e-Sata… the older the interface, the slower it typically is.
Unfortunatly yes, you’ll have to uninstall and fresh install on the D partition. And just to confirm what the others have said, there is no logical reason why WoW wouldn’t install on an NTFS partition. It should work fine.
Agreed. What’s to uninstall, BTW, if you couldn’t install it on C:?
I’m pretty sure Windows XP uses NTFS by default. That means any game expecting to find a large market would have to work in that file system, so no worries there.
This game isn’t really for your son, is it. You said something about protecting it with your password? So can Windows XP only protect files by username on the boot partition? That kind of sucks but I don’t know if it’s any different for Macs/Unix. There may be a way to password-protect the WoW folder on D:, but you’ll have to experiment to see if it prevents the game from being playable.
Possibly, but I know the drives I have are not good for running most software, even viewing images is a lot slower. This is to my Maxtor OneTouch with Firewire 400. When not in use, the device is built to spin down the HD whenever possible, which could really screw up your game play. My other external drive is a RAID 5 over Ethernet, so it’s slower than the Maxtor.
And what about your C: partition? There might be a ton of stuff on there that you can move over to D:, though I prefer keeping Windows in its own space, and my user files elsewhere if possible. Soon I too will be running Windows again, as the secondary OS on my iMac.
It was the updates that automatically downloaded when we started the game that wouldn’t fit onto the C drive - then the game wouldn’t work. We managed to delete/uninstall a few things to get the game on from the disks.
Honest, John, the game’s not for me! (I don’t have the patience, ability, funds or time!).
It was just that I moved a lot of my docs to the D drive to create space on the C drive for this d*mn game and then found that everyone had access to them. I’ve encrypted them, but all that seemed to do is change their names to a green font.
I think loading the game onto the D drive is the way to go though, as I can’t see anything else that seems to be taking up more than a few MB other than MS office, adobe, and other programs.
assuming it’s an NTFS partition, you right-click on the folder in question, go to properties, then click on the security tab. From here, you can assign what usernames have which permissions.
If your d: drive is NOT NTFS, you can convert it by going to the command-line and typing:
convert D: /fs:ntfs
note: This is a one-way operation. If you need to go back to FAT32 for any reason, you’ll need to reformat the partition.
So can Windows XP only protect files by username on the boot partition? That kind of sucks but I don’t know if it’s any different for Macs/Unix. There may be a way to password-protect the WoW folder on D:, but you’ll have to experiment to see if it prevents the game from being playable.