Increasing Size of C Partition

I am having trouble with my Sony Vaio computer that is related to disk space on the C Drive. It is partitionned into 2 drives with the C drive having about 15 Gigs and a D drive with 100+ Gigs. I have always been critical about installing all new programs on the D drive to save space on the C, but now,I am nonetheless running out of space on the C drive. I cannot run the Service Pack updates or even HotSync my Palm Pilot because of limited disk space. Is it possible to increase the size of the C partition, taking space from the D drive? I cannot find any large programs to move from the C drive that would add any significant size to this drive, this was my first consideration. I have run DiskData on the drive to see where the allocation is going, but cannot seem to account for much of the space. Thanks for any help

 

You're going to need some additional software to accomplish what you want to do. I've used Partition Magic for the same purpose and it works quite well. You should be able to get it at your local computer retail store, or you can get it from www.symantec.com. It's fairly easy to use and works very well.

 

Changing Size of disk Partition

Thanks Bill,
I have used Partition Magic in the past and still have my copy (though with my luck, XP requires a new version). I have never adjusted the C partition and was not sure if it was possible to play with it's size.

Fred Townroe

 

You're welcome Fred. For XP, I think you will need the latest version, which I believe to be Version 8. If you already own an older copy you may be able to get an upgrade from Symantec rather than paying full price, worth checking into. It's very good at resizing partitions and moving any data necessary to accommodate the move.

 

An alternative to spending money right now (holidays and all that) is to move your swap file to the larger partition. I don't know how large your swap file is but you may be able to free up enough space for now and resize later.

 

Kevin,
Thanks for the suggestion and I will look into that option, but if memory serves, I have already done that. I may look at increasing the size of the swap file even further.

 

If you go the partition magic or similar route, clean out as much as you can and make sure you defrag both partitions just before the operation so you have a chunk of contiguous free space for the resize.

 

Increasing Space on C drive

Thanks Paul and others. I will follow up with your suggested programs Paul. After some digging I did find that my daughter had left me with 3 Gigs of temporary internet files cluttering the C drive. Removing them has substantially increased my space on the drive but alas, has not made my Palm Pilot any more cooperative. I will try to search out support groups for the Palm and only hope that they are as good as this forum. The forum at Palm's site has a lot of frustrated owners posting questions, but very few answers.

 

You can move your TIF's to the D drive if you want. In IE click tools>internet options and where it says Temporary Internet Files click the settings button. Then click on the move folder button. Having said that, have you had a look at the program files folder on the C drive? Seems like 15 gigs should be plenty of room for windows. I have mine installed on a 5 gig partition and still have 1.5 gigs free after a year and a half. Have you moved the My Documents folder yet? If not, right click on it and choose properties and then click the move button. This may get you some additional space. How about the recycle bin? Perhaps configuring it to use less space could get you some additional room (right click on it and choose properties). Also, how about system restore? You can configure it to use less room too. Right click on My Computer>properties and then click on the settings button.

 

Fred,
A couple of areas where space may be used up more than needed.

System restore. Yours is turned on? It should be. The default size is 10% so your C drive may have 1.5GB reserved for system restore and if it's on for your D drive it may have allocated 10GB! I recommend resizing the slider to a few hundred MB's at most.

There is a folder in c:/Windows called Downloaded Installations. Many programmes you install put their install files here taking up a lot of space. Provided you have the original exe/install package for the programmes you install it's OK to delete everything from this folder. I do. You could have 10's or hundreds of megs here in files.

Your tempory internet files size under each user login can be set to something more sensible than what the default is set by windows according to your drive size. I set min to 20MB, which is heaps more than I would ever need. Even 1MB is a lot of stored pages. But I'd suggest 10 or 20MB as some video/audio files that are streamed are kept in this folder as well, and they can use up the maximum very quickly. I delete my TIF's, cookies and history every few days.

 

Partition Magic 7 will do NTFS partitions. But it may not want to do a hard drive as large as yours. You can get PM 8 on the internet a lot cheaper than through Symantec.