c:-drive V d:-drive

albionrovers

An easy one hopefully.

Wife's 6 month old laptop came up with message disk full last night. I downloaded WinDirStat and her c:-drive in total came to only 75Gb, with the rest (500gb whatever) stored on d:-drive.

My 6 year old Dell has never needed me to specifiy where to save stuff, it has always defaulted to c: end of story, the majority of the storage except for maybe a few Gb. My wife's defaults to c: too.

What should I do to fix please? And please don't say delete files

NiftyDigits

You can simply create new Folders on the drive and then copy your Documents/Music/Pictures over to them. Once copied, you can delete the contents of those folders from the C: drive and then change the default path to the drive.

I'm sure that you can find a simple tutorial.

John_Gray

The alternative is to reduce the size of your drive and correspondingly increase the size of the C: drive.

If there is nothing on the drive you can probably make use of Windows features by deleting the partition, increasing the size of the C: partition, and recreating a smaller partition. Tutorials on the web.

Or you can use a free "partition size manipulating program" which can cope with there being data files on the partition. I've use EaseUS Partition Master several times, and there are others available. Beware that this is not a rapid process and you should perhaps allow a small number of hours for the manpulations involved.

vuvuzela

No need to create new folders and copy across, there are easier and quicker ways to do this.
Windows 7 :
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/redirect-folder-new-location#1TC=windows-7
Windows 8 :
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_8-files/how-to-move-user-folders-to-2nd-drive-in-windows-8/f58029d0-bfcf-4fab-a266-a56f6d9e65b5

vuvuzela

Personally I wouldn't resize the partition, I'd keep the D drive for data (making sure you back it up regularly). That way if the primary Windows partition fails, the data may still be easily recoverable from the other partition (as long as your drive isn't encrypted).

googler

albionrovers wrote: »

Wife's 6 month old laptop came up with message disk full last night. I downloaded WinDirStat and her c:-drive in total came to only 75Gb, with the rest (500gb whatever) stored on d:-drive.

So which one is full?


What should I do to fix please? And please don't say delete files

You may HAVE to delete files. If the filing cabinet is full, what do you do? You remove some of the paperwork, and shred or recycle it (or move it to another store with space for it).

Establish exactly what is on each drive (WinDirStat will tell you this).
Decide what, of the above, has been user-generated - i.e. your wife's data files - photos, documents, music, etc.
Consider moving some of this from the full drive to the one with some free space.

Deleting files is also an option - temporary internet files and cookies can be cleared from the Tools or similar menus within her web browser. If she has data that is of no use, delete it.

albionrovers

I meant I know how to delete files.
I'm more interested in re-allocation of disk space automatically instead of manually moving videos/pictures from disk => disk.

Many thanks for replies.