Partition problems
 

So my mom's old harddrive went to swim with the fishes. Of course she calls on me to come fix it. I pick her up a new one and install all the programs. While I'm doing this I realize there is way way less space than there should be (its a ~150gb harddrive and I was running out at 7gb.)

After some digging I realized for some reason windows XP only created one partition to install windows on...that was only 7gp big. Skip ahead. After some fixing and mucking about I end up with 3 partitions. A 7gb with windows and some programs (/c). A 54mb useless one. And the big one (~130gbs.)

The problem is the system constantly thinks its low on space and readjusts virtual memory. This causes everything to run slow. It also defaults to installing things on drive C which has such limited space. Like mydocs and all that are in there.

So what's the easiest solution? If I delete a partition everything goes by by on that partition right?

I could manually move things over to the bigger drive but I hear that can go south rather quickly and is annoyingly complicated to boot.

Or I could uninstall all the programs except window's off drive C and reinstall them on the big drive. That sounds annoying plus I may still have all the same problems.

Or I could reformat completely and start from scratch.

That sound about right? What route do you think I should go?

I would reformat completely and start from scratch. You could dick around with a partition program but it sounds like it's a mess already. When you reformat make sure to delete all partitions (except the 54 MB one, it sounds like a diagnostics partition) and make one big one. The XP installation should give you the options to do this.

^^Yep, start from scratch. Partition magic can re-size regular partitions without formatting but it costs and is also a pain in the ass to use. Start again and this time make sure XP has at least 20GB to go with.

That's normally what I do. I'm not sure what went wrong this time. Probably wasn't paying enough attention since it wasn't my computer.

Yep, I use a 20 gig for windows and I made 2 more out of the balance, a 40 & 90 gig where I store docs, pics, vids, porn, whatever.

---------- Post added at 02:45 PM ---------- Previous post was at 02:41 PM ----------

Oh yea, you can use diskpart after you're up and running but data can be lost so its best to start from scratch as previously stated.

A Description of the Diskpart Command-Line Utility

Just use an Ultimate Boot CD - Overview to run the partition manager of your choice (I like partition resizer or cute partition manager, myself). No need to uninstall/reinstall/reformat.