Partitioning hard drives

[Shadoo]

Hi for god knows how long my pc has been having problems with the c drive, it is continually bleow 100mb of free space on c drive and this is slowing the pc, i delete things but sooner or later it would be used up again, i know that c was split into two seperate drives so is there ne way to bring the two drives back together to allow for more space?

many thats Shadoo

 

[UndyingAngel]

Hi for god knows how long my pc has been having problems with the c drive, it is continually bleow 100mb of free space on c drive and this is slowing the pc, i delete things but sooner or later it would be used up again, i know that c was split into two seperate drives so is there ne way to bring the two drives back together to allow for more space?

many thats Shadoo

PartitionMagic is your friend for doing this but depending on the size of your drive.. it can take hours and I mean hours

 

[Cylian]

best would be to just increase the size of drice c: a bit. Mine is currently 10gig and doing fine.
Main reason to keep the OS and Data seperated is, when you want to reinstall your OS due to whatever reason.

Some programs you should take a look on are Partition Magic and True Image.
An image file of a fresh install is usually back faster on your drive than a fresh install.

 

[Alan]

As a short term fix - if your running NT/2K/XP you can move your pagefile off the C:

 

[punchy]

unfortunately windows will just fill scratch areas (temp file storage) with junk. look in your temp file areas, typically these are...


%windir%\Temp (see below for explanation of %WHAT_THIS_MEANS%)
%SystemRoot%\Temp
%SystemDrive%\Temp
%TEMP%
%TMP%

the %NAME% syntax denotes an environment variable. Type "set" in a cmd.exe windows (command.exe on windows9x/Me systems) and a list of environment variables (some system wide, others user profile specific) will print out, check out what the variables I have listed above are set to.

Quick example, the output of "set" has a line that reads

SystemRoot=C:\WINNT

That means you should check out C:\WINNT\Temp for lots of files.

In particular check out %TEMP% and %TMP% (usually equivalent to C:\DOCUME~1\%USERNAME%\LOCALS~1\Temp on a WinXP/2k system) I've seen some problem installations fill these folders with 10's of THOUSANDS of files (65,000+ objects) if this is the case you should delete them at the command line since the GUI (windows explorer) will crash trying to handle that many objects.

Results may vary but I've seen significant amounts of storage reclaimed through such housekeeping when I had the dubious honour of supporting 150+ Win2k laptops in the field. Thank god I took that Solaris course and got a new job

p.s. all the other advice given above is good, though I would only start joining partitions as a last resort. Yes partition magic is often a life saver Remember you can always install software to a partition other than your system one. In the event of an OS reinstall: applications usually need to be reinstalled anyway.

 

[Shadoo]

many thanks guys im gonna give all that a go now