How to make room on C: drive

[Royk]

My C: drive is over 85% full. I'd like to transfer some of the program files over to D:. Do I need to uninstall and reinstall on D: or is there some way I can simply move them so the computer still knows where to look?

 

[fest3er]

Move program files to D? It can be done, but Windows *really* prefers programs to be installed on C. I'd say don't try. If you have lots of data, *that* can be moved to D. You should be able to move entire directories to D and create links to the new locations where the directories used to was.

When's the last time you cleaned out all the temp files, downloaded files, cookies and cached web pages? This *can* consume a significant amount of disk space.

Are C and D on the same drive? If so and you are confident of your maintenance skills, you can use something like gparted to shrink the D partition and move it away from C, then add the new space to C and give yourself more room. (I've recently heard bad things about Partition Magic, BTW. )

 

[Joe G.]

My C: drive is over 85% full. I'd like to transfer some of the program files over to D:. Do I need to uninstall and reinstall on D: or is there some way I can simply move them so the computer still knows where to look?

There are a few solutions, but I need a little detail about your system. XP or Vista? Is D: a separate physical drive or another partition on the same drive as C:? If you don't know right click on My Computer (Computer in Vista). Click on manage. Then click on Disk Management.



Huge drives are cheap. I recently purchased a 1TB SATA drive for a little less than $100. My wife's computer was getting pretty slow so I replaced her old slow drive with a new SATA drive that is much larger. I used Disk Management and the shareware version of Casper to move the contents of C: to the new drive so that I was able to remove the old slow drive and am now using the big drive as C: on that computer. If you wish, email me at -- email address removed -- and we can discuss your situation in detail.

 

[Royk]

"If you have lots of data, *that* can be moved to D. "



No, I try to keep data off of C:



"When's the last time you cleaned out all the temp files, downloaded files, cookies and cached web pages?"



I run CCleaner almost daily.



"Are C and D on the same drive? If so and you are confident of your maintenance skills, you can use something like gparted to shrink the D partition and move it away from C, then add the new space to C and give yourself more room. "



Yes they are the same drive, and I thought of using a repartioning program, but would rather do that as a last resort. I've used them before with mixed results.



"There are a few solutions, but I need a little detail about your system. XP or Vista?"



XP



C: and D: are a Maxtor 200G drive that is an upgrade from the stock drive. I also have another Maxtor 200G as an E: drive. I wanted to have my C: as small as possible, basically as home to the OS. It is currently 38G. When I install software, I always install to D: if the install program gives me the option, but often they don't. Running software from Program Files on D: seems to work just as well as from on C:. I wanted D: to to be larger for storage of photos (lot's of hi-res, big files) and music, and E: was to be for video. C: has just gotten polluted over the last couple years by certain software. I basically want to get the drive under 85% so my Diskkeeper software has the breathing room it needs to defrag and optimize the drive.

 

[Joe G.]

Have you tried to move a program to D: and change the shortcuts to it to refer to D:?

 

[ACoyle]

Yeah what Neal and Joe said. Another sticking point is the swap file This vital to windows. By default it is on your C:\drive. You can use the info in the link I just posted to move it to one of your other drives.



In the long run, it is easier to just "Go With the Flow". Get one of those 1 TB SATA drives, Load windows on a big C:\ partition and reinstall your software. You may find that lots fo the software installed there is stuff you do not want any more. Also a freshly loaded copy of Windows is faster.



Just my opinion.



AC

 

[Joe G.]

If you get a big drive it's a lot easier to use a program like Casper, Casper hard disk copying software provides complete PC backup protection | Future Systems Solutions , to move your system to the new drive without doing a new installation. It will copy the entire physical drive or partition (drive letter) at a time so you can adjust the partition sizes is with Disk Management between copies. You need to set the C: image as active in Disk Management so it will be bootable if copy a partition at a time. If you copy the entire disk it will be bootable, but C: will be exactly the same size as it is now.

BTW I think RegCure is a better program than CCleaner. I have that scheduled to run every night after Casper runs to make a backup on my big disk. My computer, unlike my wife's, already had a SATA drive as C: so I installed the 1 TB drive with two partitions as drive D: and drive R: (recovery) for a backup image of C:. I moved a bunch of stuff to D: so my system is really quick now. C: and D: are on different physical drives so there is not as much seek time involved.

 

[MVenditti]

An external drive would help. You can put space hogs like pics, music, video etc here.

 

[Royk]

An external drive would help. You can put space hogs like pics, music, video etc here.

I've already got drives for those. Need to increase the existing C: drive, which doesn't have any space hogs.



I'll look at Casper, but with warm weather approaching, this problem may get moved to the back burner.

 

[Joe G.]

You might want to keep your space hog data on a separate physical drive. If it's on the same hardware device then you are not saving any seek time by moving stuff around. Program files on C: drive really don't affect performance that much because most of them are accessed once to load and start them. After that the running program will be in your swap file. Data files such as photos, videos, and databases should be on a separate hardware device than C: to minimize seek time.

 

[fest3er]

... I wanted to have my C: as small as possible, basically as home to the OS. It is currently 38G. ...

What do you have on C: that is taking up that much space? My slightly used XP system has 3GB in Windows, 3GB in Docs/Settings, 2. 5GB in Program Files, and 1. 8GB in SysVolInfo. It's hard to believe that you still have over 30GB of stuff in C: after you moved your data elsewhere!