HELP!! Running out of disk space
 

I, for some reason installed windows xp onto my smaller HD and it is now running out of space. I had meant to put it on my c drive which has more than enough room. Is there some way I can transfer all of my system files from one drive to another? Pretty much take all that is on my D drive and put it on my C. Is this at all possible?

There are programs out there that can copy a hard drive. One thing though that you might want to do is if you kept the smaller hd, and played around with it, clear your temp files until you can copy the hd over.

One of the programs Fallon is talking about is Norton Ghost. I used it recently to copy one hard drive to another, worked perfectly. It costs a bit though. Don't know about the finding-it-on-KaZaa-or-whatever option.

If I was to copy the D drive(containing windows) to my C drive would windows and all the important shit still work, and would my computer boot up with no problems?

You might have to play with your boot order in BIOS, it might depend on your motherboard, otherwise just ghost c --> d, reformat c, then swap your master and slave drives inside the case, (OS(your larger drive) should be on master)

This may sound a bit silly, but you could always use your larger drive to hold the data\temp files if you don't have the time to try ghosting your current drive to the larger drive.

You can start by deleting the temp files from your browser, then in system properties (right click on my computer - select properties), go to the advanced tab, click on environment properties and re-point the TEMP and TMP variables (for both user and system variables) to something like d:\temp (edit the existing entries), click ok when done. While you are in the advanced tab you can also click on the settings for performance options, go to the advanced tab, click on the change button for the virtual memory, and create a new swap file on the d: drive, when done you should be able to at least shrink or get rid of the swap file that is (by default) on your c:. After that you can also set some of your programs to save stuff to the d: drive (i.e. temp files for the web browser, etc).

I know i missed some details/may not have explained this clearly enough, but it should give you a different option if you can't get the ghost thing to work out.

Yeah, I agree with heyal256. Several people I know run a similar set up, with a small partition/drive to hold the operating system, and a completely seperate partition/drive to hold the programs, settings, documents, and other data. While I personally don't run that, it should work out fine, as perhaps a simpler, less time-consuming solution to your problem.

I second (I mean third) what heyal256 suggests.

Other benefits of doing this are that you can reinstall the OS if needed, and your data on D: won't be touched. Also, it may help with fragmentation on the drive that contains your system files.

Never tried it but couldn't you System Format your D drive and copy over your C drive to D then via the Computer Management applet change the drive letters and clean format C?

My suggestion, use Partition Magic.

I've successfully coppied active partitions to multiple HD's without any problems - all boot up fine.