I really hope I'm in the right spot for this. I'm unsure of how to even look this stuff up with my specific questions in mind.

My parents had their computer reformatted by a friend of the family. Now they are having an issue with lack of space on the C drive. The reason being, this friend partitionned the harddrive into C and D drives. C drive has roughly 28 Gigs... the D drive holds the bulk of it with roughly 48 G. I don't know why this was done, I'm not a pro at all this but my understanding is that this just doesn't make sense? The C drive is the main drive, obviously.. However, there is space on the D drive to use. The C drive is just about gone with only 170mb of space left. They basically can't do much with it anymore.

The C drive is maxed out. My parents don't know very much about computers so they wouldn't know how to select the other drive to install things onto... It's just not all too feasible for someone with little knowledge to have to do this.

I on the other hand did understand to use D drive.. and have installed many things to the D drive noticing the diminished space in C. Some of these things include certain types of updates, new drivers, things that I'm not sure the comp could function properly (unless I'm wrong and correct me if I am). I didn't realize at first though the C drive held so little space.. I probably should have but don't use this computer too often in the first place.

My parents need space on the C drive, this one program they do need will only default to C, there is no option for D, and I'm sure there is one somehow although I want to fix this entirely.

How do I properly partition these harddrives without a) losing all the data on the D drive, b) without making the comp crash without some of these programs/updates that were isntalled to D if I do in fact lose all on D drive.. as I said before, correct me if I'm wrong in this thought. and c) don't hit me for this one if I am wrong here also, this is why I'm coming to you guys, would the 'recovery disc' not be found on the D drive from the initial computer set up? and would this be lost...

I'm sure I'll have more questions. Just looking for the best possible way to do this that makes the most sense and hoping that it can be easily done, though I don't know how it could be.

I have suggested an external harddrive.. I've also suggested to buy a new computer Any other suggestions? Help!

Thanks

Hi natron,

Just a quick suggestion before I have to go offline.

Check out this page to relocate the My Documents folder to the D: drive (partition). This will have the effect of freeing up space on the C: drive, making sure any new documents are stored on D: and also making it easier to backup documents.

I will have another look through your post tomorrow unless someone else jumps in.

Another thought - what are the settings for Virtual Memory?

Right click My Computer and select Properties. On the Advanced tab click Settings in the 'Performance' section. Then click the Advanced tab in the Performance Options window. Finally, click Change in the 'Virtual Memory' section.

Let me know the drive for the Paging File (probably C: ), the Paging File Size (something like 1500 - 3000) and also whether 'Custom size' or 'System managed size' is checked.

Click Cancel, Cancel, Cancel to back out of the System Properties window without making any changes.

Hey!

Thanks for replying so quickly. I'll put the answers to those questions in bold in your quoted text down below.

I take back what I said. I did switch the my documents folder as my parents required the computer to not be overloaded and risk the computer not working today. It freed over 11gigs of space on C. I guess this is good. Not sure what can actually be done, if you can move everything and the space on D to C...

Just so you get a little better perspective;
My system is on an ASUS M3A32-MVP mother board, that is an advanced system board.
The CPU is an AMD Quad core 9850 which is running at 13 times the fsb of 200MHz which is 2600 MHz on all four cores.
And two one gigabyte Dimms of memory.
There are four 500 Gigabyte Seagate ES.2 Hard Drives installed in this case and the boot partition or Active partition is only 20,480MB which is 20Gigabytes,
You do not need a very large boot partition,
You can run a small country on a 20GB boot partition.

As PAN_IRISH said, the boot partition need not be large, though when there are many programs installed on the C: drive the space can rapidly shrink.

Without using a specialised program such as Partition Magic it is difficult to resize partitions safely. I asked about your Virtual Memory settings as it is possible to move that to the D: drive. Given the current size you would not gain a great deal of space by doing so.

How much free space do you now have on C: and D: ? (Open My Computer, right click on each drive in turn and select Properties. The amount of free space, in GB, will be shown).

I'm not home currently but will be tonight. I'm just wanting to get clarity on something you both have said. There's no need for a big partition for the boot drive/partition.... "it was a good move to make a small boot or active partition by your friend." The partition wasn't small though, it was much more then half the harddrive and I am not sure if there is even a system restore or whatchyamacallit on there.. I honnestly don't think it serves more purpose then to have storage cut in half.

I'm just confused by what was said and what the actual scenario is. Anyway, I'll get that info for you tonight hopefully mister2.

Thanks!

Small is a relative term here.

With modern hard drives, a 20GB partition out of 250GB would be small compared to the overall size. Storing the minimum amount of data on the boot partition makes life easier if you ever need to reinstall Windows - documents, music, photos, emails and so on will remain untouched.

Sure, many applications will need to be reinstalled (they write entries to the registry which is on the same partition as Windows) but that's a relatively simple task.

I think to partition that small of an amount from a 250GB HD makes sense... However, this is a 80GB hardrive, where the main drive (Is this what you're calling the boot partition? or the active partition?) this C drive holds only 27GB, the majority is in the D drive with 47GB or so.. I didn't get a chance to check the comp last night, though it is approximately those sizes. I'm just getting confused with the terms that you're using.

I just see more problems arising if the main drive is the one that is smaller and is being used for everything, my parents don't understand computers at all, they just hit 'install' and it goes to whereever (always C since they don't know otherwise). They don't care that there's a partition and they need to select whatever to make sure they don't overuse space in one drive. This is what I'm trying to fix for them, so that when they go to install, or use something, it just works. This wouldn't be an issue if the D drive weren't so big. I believe I'm just confusing your termonology as I'm not accustomed to that. I don't expect my parents to understand any of this as it's not something most people need to worry about.

Bottom line is that their harddrive isn't as big as a normal harddrive these days. My personal computer has 400GB, never have an issue with it. My parents C drive is their main drive, they know nothing about partitions or the fact they have a D drive. Sure if they go to reformat they won't lose the D drive but they don't care about this. They just care about being able to properly use their computer without having to know the ins and outs. 27GB out of 80GB I think is quite small to be the main drive? I don't expect my parents to reformat their computer either. They have a lot of things on there, and there's really no issues with their computer to require a reformat, simply their HD is partitionned in a way that I don't think works for them.

I will definately post back tonight once I get there to let you both know those specific details.

Sorry that I'm not understanding what you guys are saying. I don't see how this partition is appropriate for them. Maybe if someone understood to make sure they installed things to the right drive, and stored things properly... but they don't know how to do this, and it really would be time consuming to do all that themselves when they don't care to go through all that trouble. It's just a family computer.

Anyway, I'll be abck later.

Thanks guys

Hi natron,

My apologies - I am guilty of mixing my jargon up. I have several partitions spread over 2 internal hard drives and an external (USB) drive. I often forget which partition is on which physical hard drive so I refer to them as my J: drive, K: drive:, L: drive and so on even though they are actually partitions on my second hard drive.

When I refer to your C: drive then I mean the main partition on the main hard drive that holds Windows and is used to boot your system up. It is also known as the main partition, the active partition, the boot partition or the primary partition.

At this point you either need to buy an application that can resize partitions 'live', keeping all the data intact and without reformatting or else regain some space on the C: partition by moving the following to the D: partition:

1 - Move My Documents to D: as I outlined earlier. This will free up space on C: and also redirect the default location for storing documents to D:

2 - Redirect any new program installations to a new My Programs folder on D: as in this article . This will not free up and more space on C: but should ensure any new programs are installed on D:

Note that this is an unsupported (by MS) tweak. If you decide to do this then please backup the registry first as described from the link in that article.

3 - Move the Swap File (also known as Virtual Memory or the Page File) onto D: as described here . This will also free up some space on C: and may also give a slight performance boost. I would check 'Custom Size' and set the both the minimum and maximum values to 1½ times the amount of RAM on that system.

Natron, the bulk of what PAN IRISH said makes perfect sense to me - however, to someone not as familiar as yourself, it probably sounds like gibberish, gobbledygook, or just plain Greek.

Let me try to explain.

First of all, a small aside - HD manufacturers don't use the same mathematical computation as your operating system (Windows, in this case) does to determine drive size. Thus, your HD is called an 80 GB drive but in fact will actually hold a bit less - probably around 74 GB (which lines up right with the two partition sizes you say you have ~28 and ~48.

Now, the word partition when used in terms of HDs is pretty much the same definition as any regular old partition - think in terms of modern day cubicles at the office. You take a really big room and give a bunch of folks little tiny work spaces that they consider 'their own'. On the hard drive, the concept is the same - you take one big hard drive and section off parts of it into smaller parts (partitions) that Windows displays as different *drives* - whereas, in reality, it is not a different physical *drive* it is just a different physical *partition* on the *same* drive.

What your family's friend did was to take your family's original hard drive, which had one big single partition on it (and was called C) and split it up into two parts - a smaller partition with the main system 'drive' (partition, which shows as your C: drive in Windows) and a second, larger 'drive' (partition, which shows as your D: drive). There are merits to what PAN IRISH said, in that if you ever encounter a problem and you have to format your C: drive (which is where all the Windows system files are located) then having every thing on one big drive can mean that all those pictures you've saved, all that email you've been archiving, all those home digital movies you took of the kids, etc, can *conceivably* go to waste.

But, there is more to the story than that. Partitioning requires work - you have to know what is going on and how to use it - your family's friend may have thought he was doing you a service by partitioning the drive, but by not taking your family through a 3-5 hour instructional course, did you a huge disservice - because you had no idea that all that space was there *specifically* for you to put all your data in. Furthermore, he probably didn't account for numerous other things, like teaching you to regularly perform maintenance on your computer (from simple things like cleaning out your temporary files, to manually creating a restore point when your system is in tip top shape and then removing all the rest of your older restore points, to checking to see if you had any old, unused applications, etc.

Since moving the My Documents folder only cleaned up 11 GB of space, you'll want to look at a couple of other things as well - one of the things PAN mentioned was that System Restore will probably be taking up a sizable chunk of space, but part of that depends upon whether your family's friend used the same Windows XP setup as it was originally configured when you bought it, or if he made adjustments during the installation process and / or installed a different copy of Windows.

Suffice it to say that you should move everything (but programs, those don't move very easily) to the other drive - In the event of a malware infection there is a decent chance that the other drive can be left untouched (not always, as might have been implied - sometimes an infection will require a complete format of the hard drive, and infections don't always limit themselves to *just* the system drive).

Another thing he (or someone, at least) should have done is educate you in the process of making data backups. It has been a mantra in the computer industry for well over the 25 years I have been playing with computers, that you need to continually be making backups of your data at the very least, if not your entire HD....but the good thing is that, armed with the knowledge of how to effectively back up your system, it pretty much eliminates the need to partition your drive - and, to be quite honest, anything that is dearly treasured (pics of the last vacation, the videos of your kids' birthdays, etc) should never only exist in one place 0- they should exist in multiple places to give you a bit of redundancy - because one thing you *have* to learn right now:

If it is digital, it can be corrupted. What I mean by that is that if it is stored on a hard drive, a CD, a DVD, a floppy, A USB Flash Device (aka UFD, also AKA thumb drive, key drive etc) - if it can be transmitted in any manner fashion or form from one computer to another or can be stored on a computer, it is digital - and if it is digital it can always have a chance of being messed up somehow, someway.

I would now suggest hat you visit the following link to read up on System Restore as it is implemented in XP:

http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/tutorials/tutorial56.html

If you have the time, follow the tutorial *exactly* first for the section entitled Manually Creating Restore Points (hint: use the link at the top of the page to quickly get to that section), and then follow with the section Deleting Restore Points - use the Disk Cleanup method (the first one listed).

After that is done, post back with how much space (if any) is recovered) and we'll see about getting some more space in some other ways.

Oops - Mister was also posting at the same time as I was - but his suggestions are valid ones as well. It takes some getting used to when using multiple partitions, but those of us that do it regularly wonder how those of you who don't ever get by without doing it.