c drive and d drive on laptop, help needed

chaddythebear

My friend has a sony viao laptop with 100gb and 516 ram running windows xp.

The problem he is having is its c drive is showing full (30gb), less than 500mb left, i have defragmented it for him, and done a clean up. I can on find 2.5gb in the photo's and 9.5gb in his music folder, where is the rest hidden? Is there any way i can see this easily? He has nothing really installed on it big programme wise, itunes is the only one.

His d drive is 60gb and practially empty, is there any way of just making it one drive so to speak, i know i can move his photos for him, but that's only 2.5gb, bit weary of moving his music as that will mess up his itunes.

1, help me find what's filling his memory

2, any way to make c and d drives 1, or increase c drive?


many thanks

edison1457

Try to check the cached files / temporary Internet files and clear it if any.

JasX

you 'should' be able to wipe the D partition and extend the C to fill the space using a suitable (freeware) piece of partitioning software.

Be sure to check there is nothing important on D before removing it (eg recovery data for factory restoring your laptop)

also the above operation is very low risk but its not 'risk free' so be sure everything on the laptop is fully backed up first.

If you want to find out whats taking up his C drive start at the root directory and right click/properties each folder or group of folders in tirn til you find whats taking up all the space, if ever you find a folder takign up space that appears empty/not all space is accounted for check for hidden files and folders.

there are other solutions to this such as encouraging your friend to save things to D and install programs to the D partition, and/or go the whole hog and relocate his 'My documents' type folders and even his desktop/profile location to the second drive -google will tell you how to do this

GeoffX

GParted is supposed to be able to do this, but at the moment there appears to be a potentially serious bug in recent versions, so you'd need to use an older version.

Another option is Partition Logic.

Either way, you need to accept that the worst case scenario is that you'll lose both partitions if you do something wrong, so back-up every piece of data you can.

If you're using Internet Explorer, go into 'Internet Options' and in the 'Browsing History' section click the 'Settings' button. IE tends to allocate an overly large amount of hard disk space for caching web pages ( this will also make it much slower to start-up ), so set it to about 100(MB).

seedyh

partitionwizard.com

Still can't post links..

Has a home version that works very well, used it several times with perfect results

adrianelliott

http://www.jgoodies.com/freeware/jdiskreport/index.html

This is a disk space analyser. It will help you find all the big files on the disk, by showing you which folders contain the most stuff.

Two partitions is a great setup - lets you keep your media files and personal documents away from the Windows partition. This is very handy if you end up reinstalling or upgrading Windows.

How to move iTunes library:-
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1364

How to move entire My Documents folder (a bigger task, safer than partitioning though):-
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=310147

scottishblondie

I'd suggest moving everything that isn't software or OS to the D parition. that way as adrianelliot suggested it's safer if something goes wrong with the OS and you have to reinstall.

most of the stuff that is taking up space will probably be in the Program Files folder and the Windows folder on the C drive.

webnise

Systems with windows XP just recently updated with SP3 which takes some space.

Also, if you have 'Windows Restore' option ON, it cosumes disk space as well.

Further, you can move the 'Page File' (virtual RAM) to D drive to freeup some space.

Nikkisun

I had this problem with my laptop so I moved all of my data to the D drive (which I was told it's supposed to be for) everything moved ok but all my photos still show on the C drive and if I delete them from there then they are automatically deleted from the D drive as well!! All the documents, music etc moved ok it's just the photos I'm having problems with.