My C Drive Cannae Take The Pressure!

[Macsen]

I have some PC troubles, if anyone can help.

 

For some reason my C drive, which has Windows on it, is only 5GB size, while my D drive, with everything else, is 150GB. The D drive is only 20% full, but the C drive is getting so full it's causing major problems...

 

I tried compressing all the information on C, but then my video drivers stopped working, and when I de-compressed the information it seemed to grow again and left only 12kb of room left on C drive. This has caused all kinds of crashes...

 

I've run all of the system cleanouts, disk check, and the defragmentor, and deleted all unecessary programs (including internet browsers, games, applications...) but C is still stuffed to the gills.

 

Any ideas about what I could do? Best of all, is there any way to transfer some things, like Windows itself, to the D drive which is as empty as the New Orleans disaster relief fund?

 

Thank you for reading this.

[Crispy]

Assuming they're on the same physical drive, get a repartioning program that preserves data, like PartitionMagic, and shift some of that 20% from D: to C:.

 

Failing that, how did your Windows folder get so big? Minus my Progam Files folder, my C: drive is only 3 and a bit gigabytes, and I haven't done any kind of cleaning up at all recently. Maybe you need to reinstall Windows.

[sparhawk]

1: Check your swap space. Default it is placed on the C drive, which is obviously stupid. I recommend creating a seperate partition and fully assign it to the swap space.

2: Another good thing to do is to move the home directories. Many stupid apps put your data into your homefolders (profile) which are so aptly named "My Images, My Cock, My Cunt, etc." It is a bit of a hassle to move this na running system , but it can be done, so I would recommend to do this as well. This should free a lot of your C drive and use it only for system stuff like drivers and such. Also it would be rcommandable to use a seperate partition for your applications. I use D: for my sourcecode and work, E for applications and F for games.

[Arumakani]

Have you defragmented your C drive? Checked the registry for errors?

[OrbWeaver]

Many stupid apps put your data into your homefolders (profile) which are so aptly named "My Images, My Cock, My Cunt, etc."

 

Note to self: never hack into Sparhawk's PC.

[Arumakani]

Is sparhawk asexual? If he has both a cock and cunt he can pleasure himself without the one hand shuffle and reproduce too !!!

[Gildoran]

Er... wouldn't that be qualified as a hermaphrodite rather than asexual? Unless cutting Sparhawk in half leads to two Sparhawks... hmm, twice the programming power!

[Arumakani]

Isn't that budding like what ameoba do?

[sparhawk]

It's quite convenient to have both. No need to mess with women.

[Macsen]

Awww, I open this thread thinking 'oh good eight replies of people dealing with my problem' then find the whole thread drawn like a moth to a flame towards speculation about Spar's sexuality. Again!

 

1: Check your swap space. Default it is placed on the C drive, which is obviously stupid. I recommend creating a seperate partition and fully assign it to the swap space.

What is 'swap space'?

 

2: Another good thing to do is to move the home directories.

They are on D.

[sparhawk]

What is 'swap space'?

 

Virtual memory. In your control panel there is System and in this you have an advanced tab where you can set some parameters. There you can specify where your virtual memory should reside. I expect that it is set to C. You should move it to some other drive. I also recommend to select a decent size and make it fixed of this size. Otherwise it can happen that you system crawls to a halt, when it suddenly decides to grow or shrink the swapfile, until it is done. For my machine I set it to 2GB with a seperate partition of that size, so it takes up this entire partition.

 

They are on D.

 

Good.

[Schatten]

I've heard very bad things about PartitionMagic. Don't have 1st hand experience with it, though - I just witnessed the woe-is-me-ing and moaning on IRC more than once.

 

I second sparhawks suggestion to assign the swap to the other disk. Also, check which programs you installed on C because you just wanted those damned things to run, and see if you can un- and re-install them on D.

 

Find the diskspace hog on C. There are some little tools out there which display relative disk use distribution in a nice cake diagram. Clear your TEMP folder and put that on D, too. Don't forget to check if your browser cache has moved with the home dir (as it should).

[Komag]

I like partition magic, has been very nice and helpful for me, and easy and clean too.

[Macsen]

Thank you Sparhawk and the rest, once I get back from work I'll try and use your suggestions.

 

If you hear a loud bang that's my C drive bursting...

[Crispy]

I like partition magic, has been very nice and helpful for me, and easy and clean too.

Me too. It is a good idea to back up beforehand, just in case, but I've never had it go wrong, and this is the first time I've heard of anyone having problems.

 

Moving the swap space is a very good suggestion, I should've thought of that.

 

If you need a program to graphically display disk usage, I highly recommend SpaceMonger. It went commercial, but you can still get the free version, which works just fine: http://www.sixty-five.cc/sm/v1x.php

[Darkness_Falls]

Thanks for the virtual memory tip, Sparhawk. I should've thought of that, too. Then again, I didn't think Windows would eat up my 10GB C:\ drive partition as steadily as it has, with patches, games and programs that like to dump files on there without asking me.

 

One other hard drive hog that I hate is System Restore. I think it's normally set to consume the max amount of hard drive space it can... ~10-15% probably. That's a gigabyte of space for my little C:\ drive. No way do I need a month or two or three of restore points. So I go into Start > Control Panel > System > System Restore Tab, and then bump the disk drive usage down on each drive. I don't know what's recommended, but I put it down to like 2 or 3%.

 

There's a way to see how many restore points you have, or how much space System Restore is using(?). Start > Help and Support > Undo changes to your computer with System Restore > Restore my computer to an earlier time. It'll show you a bunch of restore points you can choose from. (And then just cancel out if you don't want to restore a point.) Depending on your settings, it might go back months. I personally don't want that much space used for System Restore.

 

(Note: I'm referring to WinXP Pro in my post. I have no idea if other Windows editions have System Restore info.)

[sparhawk]

Windows will always eat up all your resources that you throw at it.

[Macsen]

Thanks Spar I now have 1.6GB free on my C drive.

[sparhawk]

Should be enough. I usually have a 4GB partition for my C drive, and when everything is installed about 1Gb remains free which never changes much.

[Bob Obo]

I had the weirdest problem with my C:

Basically, I noticed a discrepency between the reported free space, and the actual amount of space being used. And it was slowly, but steadily growing. I ended up with about 10 gig of my hard drive mysteriously missing.

I eventually traced the problem. The hidden system restore directory. I'd previously disabled system restore and disabled the service.

Somehow Windows had then reeneabled it on the contorl panel, but not the service (fairly certain I didn't do it). It then began to eat my hard drive from beyond the grave. Fucking windows...

Edited September 7, 2006 by Bob Obo