lack of space/ partitioned drives

catherineblack

Hi,
I have a question to ask on behalf of my parents. They are having problems with space on their PC.
'We are running out of space on our hard drive which is partitioned ie. the c drive which houses all of our programs has only about 500mb left out of a total of 9gb whilst our f drive has 26gb free out of a total of 30gb.
Would the best solution be to remove the partition and is there a site where we can get a free download of partition ?'

Can anyone help?
thanks in advance
Catherine

darich

Not really sure what your problem is - If you're short of space on C drive then uninstall programs and reinstall on F drive.
I know that fdisk can be usd for partitionig drives but I'm not too familiar with it and i know that it can also delete partitions and format drives so i wouldn't want to advise you to use it.
You could also uninstall any non essential programs

albertross_2

the easy solution is to have a cleanup, and move big data files to f:

https://www.ccleaner.com

Chippy_Minton

Before playing around with partitions, there are some easy things you can do to free up space:

Move the My Documents folder to the F: drive. See http://support.microsoft.com/?id=310147. That will free lots of space if you have photos and music etc in the My Pictures and My Music folders as these are subfolders of My Documents.

Download and run www.ccleaner.com to delete junk and temporary files. Untick Yahoo toolbar when installing it.

Consider uninstalling some programs and reinstalling them on the F: drive (you don't have to accept the default C:\Program Files\ installation folder).

continentalgal

You know, generally, partitions are a good thing because you can store your personal data on the non-boot drive and in case C: crashes, you don't lose your personal data.

The problem with Windows is that, if you don't tweak it yourself, everything defaults to the C: drive, so basically, everything ever downloaded will be found there, every program you ever installed/uninstalled will have left its junk in the temp folders and probably the cache file for Internet Explorer is set much too generous rather than limiting it to 50-100 megs.

I agree with albertross to move the big data files to the F: drive but in addition, your parents could do with a utility that is able to tweak Window's hidden features (if you can't do it manually). This would prevent to automatically download everything onto the desktop or the 'My documents' folder etc.

For the less faint-hearted you could also move the pagefile.sys to the F: drive, I reckon this file alone will take up at least 1 gig of space on the C: drive. Here's someone explaining how-to but you haven't heard it from me!

continentalgal

Forgot to say, you could also get a disk partition utility, like one in this list and redistribute space between the drives (increase gigs on C:, deduct from F: drive). Also, from the sound of it, your parents have probably never defragmented the drive before which may impact available space. Many of the partition programs do that too. If the disk is still managed as FAT32 they may want to switch to NTFS (providing they use WinXP), makes smaller data clusters and is hence space-saving as well, again, another tip you will find in the help files of most partition management programs!

Before any such operation, backing up of data is always recommended!

sra

You could always have a look at what's taking up the most space on your drives using either:

WindirStat
Spacemonger

darich

continentalgal wrote: »

Forgot to say, you could also get a disk partition utility, like one in this list and redistribute space between the drives (increase gigs on C:, deduct from F: drive). Also, from the sound of it, your parents have probably never defragmented the drive before which may impact available space. Many of the partition programs do that too. If the disk is still managed as FAT32 they may want to switch to NTFS (providing they use WinXP), makes smaller data clusters and is hence space-saving as well, again, another tip you will find in the help files of most partition management programs!

Before any such operation, backing up of data is always recommended!

Agree with most of what you say except the redistribution. You can't give a drive a larger capacity by redistributing from another so if C drive has a capacity of 26gb it cannot be increased by allocation space from another physical drive. Redistribution is straightforward within one drive but not possible between 2.

Agree with defragmentation and NTFS system though.

BillScarab

darich wrote: »

Agree with most of what you say except the redistribution. You can't give a drive a larger capacity by redistributing from another so if C drive has a capacity of 26gb it cannot be increased by allocation space from another physical drive. Redistribution is straightforward within one drive but not possible between 2.

Agree with defragmentation and NTFS system though.

they only have one hard drive though. According to the OP it is one drive partitioned as 9gb C drive and 30 Gb f drive. Although partitions can be useful, for most people I think it is simpler to just have one partition on the drive.

darich

The OP didn't say that there was one physical drive - there is a C drive and an F drive. Everyone here has assumed (possibly incorrectly) that there are 2 physcial disks in the machine.

I think that having partitions is more preferable to not having them.

superscaper

BillScarab wrote: »

Although partitions can be useful, for most people I think it is simpler to just have one partition on the drive.

I can't think of a single time where it would have been advantageous for me to have partitions. Only useful thing I can think of is for dual booting but nothing else. The only type of hard disk failures I've had ruined the entire drive so, partitions wouldn't have helped then. And in terms of organisation there's no advantage between putting things in a drive and putting them in a folder.