Computer drive help needed

[Handy Al]

My PC, a Sony Vaio, recently complained about lack of disk space on drive C: Checking I find C: was only about 13 GB with about 1.3GB free. The machine came with a drive D: partition that has 92GB which is mostly free.

Can anyone tell me a safe way of expanding drive C: and reducing drive D:?

BTW: I have Windows XP SP1

[RmeDad]

Harddrive resizing.

Get a copy of Partition Magic V8.00 or later. Works great!

[wreckwriter]

RmeDad's advise is good, just be sure to RTFM before you start messing with your partitions....

Also, get a program called "ccleaner", get it here: http://www.ccleaner.com/ . Its free and will help you get rid of temp files, cache, and other garbage that's tying up space. It works well and will help you keep things tidy. Use it weekly.

One other note, I recommend upgrading to SP2. Lots of added security features and such.

[LinuxRandal]

I tried to convince a friend of mine (who always broke his computers, and asked for help to fix them), to seperate his drives into three partitions. C:,D:,E:. When you install any program, including os, install to D:, some stuff will and has to automatically go to C:. Anything you save, goes to E:. That leaves you with one area to back up, once you have made an image of the drive, with your programs and settings.

Something to think about for the future.

[Tequila]

I tried to convince a friend of mine (who always broke his computers, and asked for help to fix them), to seperate his drives into three partitions. C:,D:,E:. When you install any program, including os, install to D:, some stuff will and has to automatically go to C:. Anything you save, goes to E:. That leaves you with one area to back up, once you have made an image of the drive, with your programs and settings.

Something to think about for the future.

I look at it exactly the other way. Most people don't pay attention to what goes where on their computers, and if you partition a drive, it's a sure thing that some program will install where you didn't expect it to, and you'll think you have a backup whe you really don't. Or you'll run into a situation like Al who has plenty of space left on the drive, but not in the right partition.

You never know how somebody's going to use a computer once you hand it over to them. When I set up computers or advise someone else how to, I don't partition the drives at all - the operating system can handle it, and it saves me the trouble of having to change partitions around when the user saves everything to C instead of D. Plus I never run into Al's situation where I've got a drive that's 85% empty but complains that it's full.

Unless you're partitioning for multiple operating systems, why bother to partition and repartion drives any more?

[wreckwriter]

I have 3 partitions, main, swap, and BAK. Swap is small and is my swap/page file only, BAK is used for my backups (I use Norton Ghost disk imaging).

[LinuxRandal]

Unless you're partitioning for multiple operating systems, why bother to partition and repartion drives any more?

Back in the Win98 days, the one I was telling to do this, was running his pc's 24/7 with no off time, and no defragging. Doing things that frequently messed with the registry (of which he never backed up). He frequently would have to install the upgrade version, just to patch the damage, to get to his documents. If they had to do a reformat/reinstall, the c/d drives could be reformated, without touching your data. Or you could use a bootable os to access the one partition and either burn it to cd/dvd or send your data to a file server over the network. My experience comes from having to save a business's customer data, due to the man running the machine, being an idiot (a friend of mine, who HAS to do things the hard way, then complains about paying for it). As for XP (still have a licensed copy uninstalled, since new) it does have the nice go back feature. But it still saves on data recovery and backup.

[greencat]

My PC, a Sony Vaio, recently complained about lack of disk space on drive C: Checking I find C: was only about 13 GB with about 1.3GB free. The machine came with a drive D: partition that has 92GB which is mostly free.

Can anyone tell me a safe way of expanding drive C: and reducing drive D:?

BTW: I have Windows XP SP1

You could also move all of your data to your D: drive. That would free enough space to keep the Sony happy. The programs will install on the drive with windows. If you use office you should change the default directory to the d: drive. Partition Magic works great but there is always a potential for problems.

my 2 cents

[sacherjj]

I don't partition drives anymore either. I think that if I did, I would go insane. As it is, I look at the drives on my desktop when I'm editing and I see: A, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N and O. Only D and F are CD/DVD drives, A is floppy, the rest are 200-300 Gig hard drives. I can't imagine MORE letters. ARGH...

I do, however, put all of my documents under a certain folder. This is the same IDEA of having data partitions. I just like to have E:\Projects and the backup J:\Projects easy to syncronize and know that my data is backed up. You have to stay organized with 2.5 Tb of disk space.

[JimD]

I do what Mike suggests - programs on C, data on D. For me they tend to be similar in size. I like putting all my data into a directory I call Data so it is easy to back things up.

Jim

[gsmittle]

Shamelessly pumping up my post count....

Can't get the hang of all these "Drive Letters." My drives all have names....

g.

[kgworkman]

Free up space...

Ahh, computers...

My previous life. Somtimes I wish I had continued a career as a network admin instead of switching to power engineering. Oh well, who cares, and I digress...

One of the quickest ways to free up some space without any major fuss or muss is to move your page file from your C: partition to the D: partition. Incidentaly, this can (depending on your machine) increase the performance of your machine.

The page file is just disk space that windows uses as memory. Moving it to a spearate drive can increse your performance because windows does not have to access the "virtual memory" (page file) and the data files (program files, etc.) on the sme disk at the same time. If your second disk is on another controller, the PC can then access both of these two areas simultaneously and independantly. It removes one of the bottlenecks that can hurt your performance.

Wether it helps your performance or not, the page file can get quite large, and moving it to another drive is quick, easy, and effective.

To move it, right click My Computer and select properties:



Then seelect the Advanced tab and the Performance Settings button:



Under the Advanced tab, there is a Virtual Memory area with a "Change" button. That is where you can change the location, size, etc. of your page file.

[sacherjj]

Moving the page file off the system drive will definitely increase performance. Moving the page file to another partition on the same drive should not really have an effect on performance. Also, if you have hybernation turned on for some reason, this will also consume the same amount of hard disk space as your RAM.

[jdschulteis]

I don't partition drives anymore either. I think that if I did, I would go insane. As it is, I look at the drives on my desktop when I'm editing and I see: A, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N and O. Only D and F are CD/DVD drives, A is floppy, the rest are 200-300 Gig hard drives. I can't imagine MORE letters. ARGH...

[...]

Using XP and NTFS you can mount volumes on empty directories instead of using drive letters. See Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Computer Management (or Start, Run, compmgmt.msc), Disk Management.

[Scottydont]

Sony often partions their drives on the Multimedia oriented machines. I just ran into that on my brothers PC. They partitioned a fairly small space for the OS and Programs (10GB) and dedicated the second partition (30GB) for large video files and video capture space. He didn't use it for that so the large partion was useless. My bro is not big on reading the manuals and I am sure they explained that. More of a plug and play kind of a guy. Good thing he has me for tech support!

I used Acronis Patition Manger to resize the partition.