Running out of disc space?

Werdnal

I have an Acer Laptop, which is about 4 years old, and is running out of disc space. I have started getting occasional error messages and a flag that there is insufficient virtual memory, so assume this is related.

I have cleaned up my C: drive but it won't even let me run a defrag as I don't have enough space. However, I have also discovered I have a drive. The C: drive has 2.4 GB freespace left, and is formatted as NTFS, whilst the drive has 30 GB free space, and is formatted as FAT32. The drive appears to store data files for the Acer system.

If there any way I can release some of the space on the drive and move it to C:? Or can I just transfer some files from C: to ? I have a portable harddrive which I am going to download a lot of my files and documents onto, but seems silly that this extra space on the lappy is tied up basically doing very little!

Any advice appreciated please?

TakeThis

You can move anything that is inside your Documents/Pictures/Video folders and move them to the drive(create new folders using the same names if you wish), thus clearing space on the C: Drive.

Keep in mind that you won't be able to store single files larger than 4GB using FAT32. Do you have Recovery Discs or are there Recovery files on the drive?

[Deleted User]

If the recovery files on the D drive it will be invisable!!! to see it you will need to go in to option and click show hidden files.. and i would assume that the 30GB free space that on there is so it can be use for temp files when resetting to factory settings... Back up ur data on an external HDD and restore to factory settings.. also have you tried this.. STart - Accesorres - system tools - disk cleanup and click on all the boxes even unwated ones eg recycle bins, error reports.. also you laptop will have a few system restore point (found in the same place next tab along) i normally delete this if PC running fine as the restore point take hugh amount of space. After cant rember off my head but you can also cut the space down for the restore points. think mine only have 2 recent restore points which pc make every day

googler

A couple of Gb on C: is enough to download WinDirStat.

Do you really KNOW what's on your C: drive? Do you know what you want to keep and what you need to keep?

Download WinDirStat, and run it on your C: drive. It will tell you exactly which files are hogging your disk space, what size they are and where they are.

DO this first before you go moving things around or use disk cleanup

leseul

4 Years old. are you using Vista or XP? I assume that it's Vista

Acer are a pain for pre partitioning a drive which is taking one physical hard drive and splitting it into 2 or more 'virtual' drives. Consider shrinking your "recovery drive" of its unused space by following the instructions here (windows.microsoft.com/en-GB/windows-vista/Can-I-repartition-my-hard-disk) You can then add that recovered space on to your other drive.

Also, you may have a program running that's dumping huge log files or the system restore information taking up lots of space, once you've recovered your 30GB you could consider downloading a utility called SpaceMonger (Google it) to give you a graphical representation of where you disk space is being used. (I once cleaned over 30gb of space from a client computer that had a badly configured program spamming his hard drive with error logs).

Werdnal

Thanks for the replies and advice. I'll have a look at all the suggestions later and see whether I can get anywhere.

I'm running XP by the way. When I bought it the supplier was raving over the vurtues of Vista, but having read all the bad reviews, I insisted they install XP or I'd walk away!

leseul

Well you know what they say ... "Assumption is the mother of all .... ups"

I would tend to agree with you on the XP vs Vista argument - However Shrinking a volume on XP is slightly more difficult, but can be achieved through the use of the command line tool DiskPart.exe (be aware that this tool can be destructive if used incorrectly) or through the use of the GPartEd live CD available on SourceForge.

If you don't wan't to go down that route, a combination of TakeThis' advice about moving files followed by a general cleanup possibly using googler's WinDirStat or SpaceMonger would probably get you going again.

dogmaryxx

Consider reducing the size of your recycle bin
which is probably set to 10% of your hard drive size.

Empty recycle bin

Right click recycle bin

Click Properties

Move slider from 10% to 2%

Click Apply then OK

closed

post a hijackthis log and commit charge - instructions in the speedup sticky thread.

move the data to d, and backup to portable drive if it's important