Slim hard-drive fat.

[Corpse Cruncher]

Doing a bit of maintaince on my old computer and I notice my main C drive space was almost all gone.

My hard-drive is divided into 3 sections C D and E. E is very tiny and in FAT and is the restore drive. D is not FAT and is the back up drive with oodles of space and C the main drive with none.

Can I syphon off space of the drive marked D to add to the C drive without losing any of the data on both. I need all 3 drives and the data they hold as I have no viable way of backing it all up. Some items have extra data and this gets lost when I tried to back it up. That is what the XP dialogue said every-time I tried.


The computer is running XP home. There are also 4 users on this computer, it is what the hoarde use.

[Zep]

Possible directly with Partition Magic. Can also be done using various nifty XP command line techniques and another big HD temporarily.

If you have a CD writer, and can spare a few dollars for media, there's ways and means as well.

No doubt there's a bunch of nice freeware and shareware too that will be useful.

Can I ask why your "backup" partition contains very little? Is it not a copy of your system partition? If not, what are you backing up, and how do you do it?

[Par]

If you happen to have a Vista CD, it should be fairly simple. Let me know if so and I'll go into more detail.

[The Sopwith Turtle]

If you don't have Partition Magic, there is an open-source alternative. It's worked pretty well for me: http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php

[MRC_Hans]

I don't know the answer, but I had to open the thread after browsing past it many times and speculating wtf the title meant.

Hans

[rockoon]

Backing things up onto a different partition of the same drive is often a bad move. If the drive craps out, both partitions are likely to be useless.

I suggest buying another drive, several times the size of your existing C partition, and moving your C partition onto it. Keep this older drive for your backup purposes.

You might then also consider archiving the contents of your D: and E: partitions onto the new drive (zip it up and copy it) and reformating and repartitioning the old drive.

[Kenny 10 Bellys]

Get yourself a decent sized drive and use something like DriveXML to copy the contents across to the new drive. Wipe the old one and use it for backups.

[Aerik]

First, use the NTFS system. FAT sucks. Second, do not allow indexing of files to speed up searches. If you have to search that much, you shouldn't be trying complex **** like this.

With 4 users on the computer, you're going to have to get them all together and find out which installed programs nobody uses, and uninstall them. Clean the registry. Reduce the percentage that the recycle bin and system restore cache takes up on every drive/partition.

In fact, stop partitioning a hard drive. You can get a 200gig drive for $90, you can easily find a lesster-capacity drive just for backups.

[Corpse Cruncher]

I don't know the answer, but I had to open the thread after browsing past it many times and speculating wtf the title meant.

Hans
It was play on word on the t-shirt I was wearing which said.

'Fat a$$ slimmer.' Meaning to slim the drive or A$$ depending on whose perspective it is.:D

I think I failed the humour line didn't I?

[Corpse Cruncher]

What I was afraid of, another larger hardrive, or wipe the lot out and start again.

I just don't see the sense in the D drive having such a large amount of space when all that is on it is the computers restore items. I don't back-up to the D drive for fear of corrupting that stored information and drivers.

[Macoy]

I tried acronis disk clone in this situation - because it was a transfer to a larger capacity drive, the proportions remained the same, and the 'restore' partition became larger. It is possible that on some machines that the 'restore' function will no longer work because the 'image' has changed.

Dodgey business.

[Little 10 Toes]

I do like Partition Magic. v8.0 lets you pick the FAT as well as the size of the clusters.