C drive has less disk space than D drive

Hi,
I was over at my friend's house helping her to see why she can't defrag. We found out that she only had 10% free space on her C drive so we had to delete many folders and programs to free up enough space so it would allow her to defrag.

I then looked at the C drive and found out that it only has 16 GB of space (and is almost full) but that the D drive has 61 GB of free space and hardly anything is on it.

She has a Sony computer and it was purchased in 2002 from Circuit City.

Never before have I seen the D drive partitioned to be much larger than the C drive. She really would rather use the C drive to store all her programs, folders, and files. What does it take to make the C drive have all the 80 GB of hard drive space and even omit the D drive.

Thank you in advance for your help.

 

Hi Larsonjean,

First to clear up terminology:

Do you mean drives or partitions on a single drive?

And why not use the D partition for data? The advantage is if any re install/repair has to be done on the OS, the data is untouched on a different drive or partition. By data, I don't mean programs. I mean pictures - documents and so on.

The OS partition should be smaller if it contains only the OS + plus the programs meaning the program executables.

My OS (C) partition is 12 GB, the data partition (on another drive) is 50+ GB.

If you want to do that, then you need a 3rd party partitioning program like Partition Magic.

The D "drive" terminology has to be cleared up though, the way that you write, it seems to be a partition on the C drive.

If it is a drive, then that's a matter of taking it put of the computer.

Regards - Charles

 

Hi Charles,
Thanks for being so prompt in replying.

I guess I mean partitions on a single drive. I was just surprised that the C partition was so much smaller than the D partition. I always thought it was the opposite.

I guess she will have to use the D drive for data but she will have to remember each time to change the "Save" to D: and not C: as normal.

I'll tell her about Partition Magic and see if she wants to try that.

Jean

 

Hi larsonjean,

Not as bad as all that

XP "remembers" the last folder used for a file type saved.

Yes there is an extra click sometimes but it becomes second nature

And the folders under Documents and Settings such as My Documents and it's sub folders can be moved and the system will re direct itself to the new location. To see how to do that, look at the top of the XP forum for Christer's article: Moving Windows XP default folders Rev1

http://www.windowsbbs.com/showthread.php?t=49222

If you don't want to do that, then another alternative would be to create folders for the content of these folders in partition D.

I forgot to tell you how to look at the way the drive is setup:

Right click on My Computer > Manage > Disk Management.

The Disk Management Console can delete partitions or create partitions, but can't re size them.

Regards - Charles

 

Thanks for all your help. My friend seems to be happy with the way the computer is running now. We did move most of her documents to the D drive and she is having no problem opening them.


I think she should be OK now since she has not called me so I'm going to leave well enough alone unless she has more problems in the future.

I really appreciate your quick response and great help.

Jean

 

Thanks larsonjean for the followup, appreciate it

Regards - Charles