Focal Curve

Partition the Known Universe

Friday night I repartitioned my laptop’s hard drive. There were two main objectives of this project: 1) Split the single 40gig disk into two 20gig chunks and 2) obliterate all the annoying pre-installed Toshiba co-branded crap with a clean install of XP Pro. Smaller disk partitions are a good thing; I have one disk for the OS and applications and another for all of my files and data. It improves performance by reducing fragmentation and speeding up seek-time and also makes it easier to do backups.

When I got this Toshiba Satellite A15 back in November (killer Day-After-Thanksgiving 6-hour sale at CompUSA) it marked the first time in my professional life when I’ve been in possession of two functional computers. As such, it was also my first foray into home networking. The networking part of it was pretty simple and I had my wireless router running, configured and secured in no time. The next step was picking a theme for naming everything.

My favorite novel is Dune, by Frank Herbert. Thus the decision to name my network and devices in reference to Dune was pretty obvious. The network is named Landsraad after the interplanetary empire of the novels, with my computers being named after planets within the Landsraad. The desktop machine is named Caladan and the new laptop was christened Arrakis. Then it only seemed logical to name the drives of these machines after cities on their respective planets. Arrakis’ two new disks are named Arrakeen and Carthag, the two largest cities on the desert planet. Caladan has four partitions which still have their boring functional names of C: Windows 2000, D: Linux, E: Storage, and F: Windows XP (I haven’t booted into Win2k or Linux in ages, but until I need the room there’s no harm in leaving those partitions alone). I’ll have to do a bit of research to find the names of four cities on Caladan.

This theme has lots of room to grow: planets like Kaitain, Ix, Geidi Prime, Richese, Ginaz… Guess I need to get more computers.

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