artbrooks -

I'm a bit puzzled by a limit on total hard drive space. Never heard of such an animal. Various Windows versions have different limits on the maximum size of a single hard drive, and on the maximum size of a partition on a hard drive, but since DOS 3.1 days (ca. 25 years ago?) I've never heard of a PC that couldn't find 26 "drives" and each one is independent so far as the operating system knows.

Assuming that you're using IDE (or EIDE) drives, you can't install more than one IDE controller at a time in a computer (without exceptional effort) and the controller is limited to 4 "devices."

Using USB external drives, the only limit should be the number of USB channels, and you can cascade USB port switches (hubs) almost indefinitely, subject to the 26 drive limit.

Does your computer have a model number?

general:

Older Windows versions and the drives available when they came out had limits on maximum partition sizes that did require partitioning of the larger hard drives that were available then. Newer drives, and patches to the OSs have expanded the limits somewhat, but with an obsolete OS you may need to partition.

With WinXP the partition/drive limit is 32 TB, so it's unlikely anyone is really going to need to break a drive up into many partitions. UNLESS you are using multi-boot to more than one OS, there is NO REASON that you have to partition a hard drive if you're running WinXP and if you use FAT32 or NTFS format on the drive(s).

You can isolate your documents and other "produced" files just by making a folder to put them in, and you'll generally get better performance out of the machine if you don't partition the drive.

Once you go past 160GB or so, you may find that some maintenance tasks like defrag etc take a rather long time, and if you want to partition to do the tasks incrementally on one "drive" (partition) at a time, there's no real harm in it.

and:

Some suggestions that might help our victim friend Shaneo would be a lot easier if we knew what Operating System is being used. I could have missed it, but I don't think we've been told. (????)

John