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Hello,

I have been experiencing bootup problems. For example, I would boot up the PC and it just keeps rebooting. Yesterday it kept doing it for an hour and a half. When it finally kicked into gear, I did a CHKDSK via RUN and it discovered bad sectors.

1) Does that mean my HD is screwed?
2) I will buy a new one anyway. Something much bigger, but what are your views on partitioning?
I don't partition my drives, but I will get something reasonably bigger than what I have now. Should I partition or not? What is the value really? I mean, that if a hard drive screws up on you, it is ruined anyway, partitioned or not.

I like to have at least a seperate partition for the OS and program files, and one for general data usage.

This way if you at some point want to do a clean windows install, it's easy to just format the windows partition without having to move all your data.
The windows partition could be something between 20-30 GB, that should give enough space.

Also, you really need a second HDD (this could be an external USB one as well) for backup purposes. Use an app like SyncToy to make regular backups of your important data to the extra HDD. This way you have at least some redundancy in hardware since, as you have experienced already, harddrives sometimes do get fucked up and there's nothing worse than losing years worth of data.

Great Advice Brotha' Man King Of Snake.

I will try that app as well. I use to make hot spare copies using RAID 1, then disconnect the RAID features, but since I upgrade my libraries often this became a major hassle, and my external drive became the answer.

Since Raptors are so stable, that old approach of mine seems like wasted time.