Computer with two drives

[RichardJW~]

Our home computer has two drives on it - C: & D: both around 28 gb.
Now the C: is full and we keep getting warnings to indicate this, so how do I get it to work on the empty D: drive?

[cosmosman]

Depends what the D drive is. It could be a recovery drive. Need more information

[RichardJW~]

Hi Mike,

What sort of info & where would I find it?

RjW

[cosmosman]

Go to start at the bottom of screen and then go to 'my computer' It should list all drives. It should say what D drive is.

[RichardJW~]

Says its Local disc & file system is NTFS Is that what you mean?

[cosmosman]

On mine C drive is the main drive. Its properties are Local Disk and file system is NTFS. Drive D is also a local disk but it has a Fat32 file system. I connected a external hard drive for saving all my work etc on so the C drive is just for computer programmes.

[John Gaunt]

Hi Richard,
What do you want to put on the D drive ?
Are you familiar with right clicking the start box at the bottom and selecting explore ?
This gives you access to windows explorer. As cosmosman says, it should show a D drive. It may say backup (D:).
You will, for sure be able to save files onto D drive from the application. E.G. in MS word, when saving, select D drive.
You could also move some of your files you didn't use often (e.g. old pictures etc.) onto your D drive by using windows explorer, thus freeing up some more space on your c drive.

As your C drive is full, have you done a cleanup on it ?
If you go to windows explorer, and right click on local disc C: then select properties. this will bring up a window which has an option for disk cleanup, which you should select (it will take a while while it scans the disc to go to the next stage). Chances are if it's not been cleaned up for a long time, there will be tons of 'temporary internet' files on there. When the scan is complete you will get a window showing how much disc space you can free up. If you click OK here, windows will remove the files selected (you don't really need most if any of them, especially the temporary internet files).
This should give you a bit of working space on your C drive.
Hope this helps, it's a bit technical...

Do you know which version of windows you have ?

Given your C drive is full, or almost full, having freed up some space (see above), it would benefit from running defragmentation (but to do this you must have some free space on your c drive).
Basically, as the disc fills up, windows has to store files in bits and pieces spread across the disc, rather than all in one place. This means the disc has to work a lot harder to retrieve a file, and so it takes a long time. You can run defragmentation by right clicking Local Disc C: in explorer, selecting properties, then selecting the tools tab at the top, and selecting Defragment Now.
Defragmentation will take a long time, and you should really take a backup copy of everything before running it, just in case.....

If the c drive was badly fragmented, the performance will be much improved after defragmenting.

[ben_uk]

Not sure if you have sorted this mate but heres my 2 pence....

You have either got 2 hard drives in the system C: and D: drive, or one hard drive partitioned into 2 halfs 28Gb each which would suggest 1 hard drive of 60Gb.

If C: is almost full its a good idea to get some space freed up

You 2 options are,

1) moving all files eg, pictures, videos, music, documents etc from C: to the D: drive, this will free up C: and also help protect your files if ever the windows install failed and had to be reinstalled. all the files on D: would be safe. (unless the hard disk drive failed itself then everything would be lost)

the other option,

2)get a program called partition magic (i believe its called) and use the program to merge the 2 partions to one C: partition making it close to 60Gb in total. Doing this will NOT cause you to loose any data, really is a good program.

Anymore questions feel free to ask, worked in IT support for a few years so i no what i am on about

Thanks Ben

[Holger]

I would suggest you buy an external harddisk. USB. With one-touch-function. I have one with a big button on it. Hitting that button starts a backup of all or choosen parts of my harddisks.
You can also use that drive to store data in a normal way, as if it is a normal harddisk.
C should ONLY be used for the OS (Windows) and installed programs.

Partition Magic is good, but then you STILL have ONE disk which can fail. The data on the other partition will also be lost then.

Harddisks are VERY cheap these days!

[RichardJW~]

Well while I was at home I ran the C.Cleaner, defraged the drive etc. and it brought it back to 25gig used, so until I get back around New Year its gonna have to wait.

If I relocate My Documents to the D: drive I guess I will need to change all the file paths