   8 mb unpartitioned
  Why are there roughly 8 mb of unpartitioned space on both of my hard drives?  One I formatted with windows, the other with Partition Magic.  I remember PM suggested (or defaulted) that I leave 8 mb of space unpartitioned, but why do they do this?  And is it safe to just partition those spots?.  
  It is a buffer for the hard drive.  ;  Really?  So my HD would go slower if I partitioned it?Is it some special portion of my hard drive that is faster?  ;  You cant partition the buffer.The hard drive has its own memory, and it is used to make IO faster, where is caches data that it reads/writes from a lot.[edited by - Programmer One on May 27, 2003 2:37:22 AM];  I havn''t followed through completely, but Partition Magic is allowing me to as far as I can see.  ;  Go on IT and I''ll tell you all about it over a cup-o-tea.  ;  Don't even try to partition the buffer!  I once tried it myself and ended up having to reformat - it caused a fatal BSOD everytime i tried to boot. - I think it may have overwriten the "System Volume Information" directory or something.  The best thing to do is to leave it alone.P.S. How would 8MB really make much of a difference anyway? My Project Homepage (Infinity) |  E-Mail Me | Message Me on AIM [edited by - JoshT172 on May 27, 2003 2:53:53 AM];  You CAN''T   partation the buffer, and even if you do, the partation will be gone as soon as you reboot, since the data kept in the buffer is volitle.8MB makes a lot of difference, if you are going to be reading the same data over and over, the drives just needs to read it from fast memory, instead of finding it on the platters.  