Drive C: Full Need help transferring

AWOL_2

I have an old PC that I have upgraded through the years.

C: 10GB FULL Running Vista
70GB 50% Full Running XP

Before you comment, I installed Vista to see if its any good a couple of years ago, but in the end I decided to stick with XP and have used XP ever since.
However the time has come when I am thinking I should be utilising Vista more however after installing the latest service pack its ran out of space.
My C: drive although only 10GB only has the operating system running on it.

How can I transfer Vista Operating system over to another larger drive - I don’t want to go through a whole reinstall if it can be avoided? Trouble finding my install CD having recently moved house

Also my 70GB drive is not partitioned. If I attempt partitioning it now I stand to loose all of my current data? Can I partition the free space without loosing data?

How much space should I partition to run Vista successfully?

I have a dual boot setup - and would like to be still able to use dual boot with both XP and Vista.

I sense the common consensus is going to be buy a larger drive and reinstall- I have a 500GB extra USB drive that is only 20% full so I have the storage but just not where I need it.

Any helpful suggestions?

456789

I don't think you can move it to a diff drive

You can partition without losing data using a program such as partitionmagic but it isn't 100% effective - if something goes wrong then you could lose all the data

I would say have about 25gb for a vista drive

mdbarber

Remove all crap off the d: drive to get the data level to below 9gb, should be esy with xp then..
using drive imaging software such as ghost or acronis truimage back up the c: and d: drive to the external one, then restore the images in reverse so the d: image goes to the c drive

AWOL_2

Thanks, I like this suggestion

Back them up and then switch them over... hmmm

Since we are on a moneysaving website is there any suggested hardrive backup tools / software that is either free or really cheap that anyone can reccomend.

AWOL_2

loaner wrote: »

Compress c: especially old service pack files, move pagefile to d: Or copy the d: drive data to usb drive, delete d: data, extend the c: partition in vista disk management.

wooooh - that was straight over my head. Am not much of a techy, just self taught so you may need to break it down for me.

Compress C: that will be done within vista right?
Move pagefile to D? firstly what and where is pagefile and how do you move it to

Extend the C: drive in vista - how? is this assuming more space free when moved pagefile?

contains XP therefore how do i move/copy an operating system to an external storage device?

Thanks for your help

benjus

Personally I tend to use Linux-based tools on a bootable CD, like this one:

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php

This contains tools to allow you to resize partitions without losing data (well in theory, anyway!), back up partitions to files, all that sort of stuff. The disadvantage is that they are not nice user-friendly tools like Ghost or PartitionMagic, so there is quite a danger of trashing everything if you get it wrong.

AWOL_2

loaner wrote: »

if you can boot from vista, d is just data (including xp o/s), so copy the lot in explorer onto usb drive, then go into control panel, computer management, disk management, delete d, extend c:, and recreate a smaller, d:, then copy data back from usb drive

Will i still be able to dual boot after- ie when i swicth my PC on will it give me the option to load Vista or earlier version on d:

iamadave

Make sure you have run Disk clean-up this may free some space as a temp solution.
I have used Acronis Disk Director I think it was before which cloned my dual boot set-up to my 500GB drive from the smaller drive.