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Help - running out of hard drive space!
Strange Quark
Posts: 193 Forum Member
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as you can see below my PC is configured with two drives - the C drive is now hopelessly full, I've deleted everything I can.
is there a way to increase the space on my C drive? Or will I have to buy a new hard drive?
thanks
http://i25.photobucket.com/albums/c88/pixiefroufrou/Drive%20Space_zpsvm5s7rqy.png
is there a way to increase the space on my C drive? Or will I have to buy a new hard drive?
thanks
http://i25.photobucket.com/albums/c88/pixiefroufrou/Drive%20Space_zpsvm5s7rqy.png
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Disk drives are cheap as chips these days (an SSD for the C drive may cost a little more but worth the extra). A 250GB SSD would set you back £73 on Amazon.
You could clone the C drive using something like Macrium Reflect Free on to a larger disk temporarily plugged into a USB caddy, then replace your C drive in the PC with the new one.
I am assuming your disks are SATA, rather than IDE?
I think they're two separate drives. unfortunately that's what my PC came with
forgive me I'm not tech-savvy. Are you saying I could add more drive space to the C drive or replace it with a whole new drive? Would I have to get a professional to do that? I don't fancy mucking around with my PC drives when I don't know what I'm doing
sorry I don't know what that means
http://support.wdc.com/KnowledgeBase/answer.aspx?ID=1284
Once open the lower section of Disk Manager shows the physical drives in rows. Partitions on the drive are shown as blocks in the rows (see the images in the link above). If you have two physical drives you will see a Drive 0 and Drive 1 each with a block labelled as C: or
You cannot add space to a hard drive. It basically has whatever space the manufacturer gave it in the factory. The only way you could increase the size of the C: drive is if the drive is partitioned and not all of the drive space has been allocated. If there is an amount of unused space on the drive then you may be able to use partitioning software to rearrange how the drive is partitioned to use up this free space. But I guess that may be outside your comfort zone.
If there is no free space on the drive (Disk Manager referred to above will show you if there is) then the only way to increase the size of the C: drive is to install a new physical drive. Either to replace the existing drive completely or to use as the
Cloning means using software to make an exact copy of one drive on another drive. With some cloning software you can also increase the size of the partitions allocated to C: and
IDE and SATA are the interfaces used to connect the hard drive to the PC, if you like what plugs and cables are used. You can get adapters that allow you to plug an internal hard drive into a USB port so that you can clone the PC drive without having to open up the case and try and find a spare set of connectors. You do the cloning externally then when finished swap the drives over inside the PC.
thanks for the detalied reply.
I've checked and you're right it is one physical drive split into two. Does Windows 7 have a way that I can move space from
seems like that's the best option
I've done ccleaner. In fact I have to use it to constantly manually delete 'restore points' which use up a lot of space
Yes. It is in fact very easy, even for beginners.
Strictly, there is a small risk of corruption so it is best to backup.
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Install MiniTool Partition Wizard Free and run it.
Here are my partitions - https://postimg.org/image/hj87wrzmt/
I have G and F instead of your D
Right click your
Drag left side of partition to the right. I'd suggest you pinch about 50-100GB
Click Apply
It will take a while
Right click C: and drag right side to fill the space. Apply. This time will be quick.
thanks for the help. I'll do that
by backup do you mean I should just save my files onto a memory stick or are there other backups I should do before the partition?
If you only have Flash Sticks, keep copies of your most important files on them or in the Cloud eg Dropbox / Google Drive / OneDrive
One day, your main drive will fail.
Strange Quark: good luck - it sounds like it shouldn't be too much of a problem for you.
Following the link from RoL, if you're not up with the terminology, 1TB (terabyte) = 1000GB
You can use the built in Windows tools or something like Macrium Reflect free (http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx) to do this.
You should preferably make at least two separate back-ups on separate media, eg two separate USB hard drives, one USB hard drive and cloud storage such as OneDrive or similar services. And always check the back-up is valid before you attack the originals. By this I mean try to restore a less important file from the back-up set back to your hard drive. Better to find out the back-up is corrupt while you still have the chance to correct it rather than after all the mucking about with the hard drive has zapped the original files into oblivion.
There appears to be plenty of free space on drive D to shrink it by say 50GB using Windows' built-in Disk Management, then expand drive C using the same Windows utility. After doing a backup of important data of course as mentioned. No need to install third party utilities.
And Windows will run perfectly happily for years on a 75GB hard disk or partition if you periodically uninstall old and unused disk-hungry programs, get rid of data files that can be deleted or moved to your main data disk ( D : ) and disable fast start, sleep, hibernation etc., which can take up humongous amounts of space - though to be fair the latter works better with a faster solid state drive (SSD) rather than a hard disk, and with lots of memory (16GB here) as you can then limit or disable swap files, which also take up oodles of space.
I have been running Windows 8 on my 75GB SSD partition for well over 2 years and it still has 10GB free space and runs as fast as it ever did. I make sure my data is primarily saved to my 5TB of data disks not drive C. I have 74 programs or program groups currently installed, not to mention all the unwanted "Apps" - though I do completely ignore the latter.
Windows Disk Management is not worthy of its name and has been a huge heap of poo for many years.
Here's what I just got on a quick practice to see if I was being unfair
After, first getting a "Not enough Disk Space" error, I tried again to reduce my F partition by 1GB, which was allowed only on the right of the partition.
Trouble is, now I can't expand G to fill it with Disk Management
Disk Management does not have a Move Partition function
3rd Party Managers are essential for any serious, or even trivial, partition operations
I'm not suggesting that Disk Management is the best, but for simple tasks usually including shrink/expand, it works for me. Anything complex or if DskMgt won't do it, I do use 3rd party stuff, EaseUS Partition Master IIRC the last time.
Trouble is if you have a drive with two partitions C and D with D immediately to the right of C there is no way to resize D so that you can expand C into the space freed up using Windows Disk Manager.
The free space would be created to the right of the newly sized D and you cannot move D over so that the free space now appears between C and D.
You would have to delete D completely, resize C then create a new D.
This is 100% correct. Windows can only resize to space on the right. Minitool as RoL says is a good and reliable tool to do this
You would hope so.
But then again I do know some computer users who would be quite capable of deleting anything from a folder to a complete disk partition then come running asking "what the #@%# happened to my files?"
True and yes, that's the O/P's situation, I've used 3rd. party in that situation too but more often, in what I referred to as simple cases, I just need to shrink D (my data disk) to create space to the right for a new partition/s e.g. for a/n additional multi-boot operating system/s. I do that a lot and just use disk management for it.
Go for 1TB, if you can, if not, 500GB.
are you saying that if I follow the method outlined in post #9 above it will delete everything on my D drive?
I thought I would just be taking some space from it and putting it on C:
If you follow the procedure in post 9 then that does not involve deleting the D partition.The post you replied to was in response to my post about not being able to resize C using the built in Windows tools unless you delete D. The post 9 method does not involve deleting any partitions. So in theory no data will be affected.
But having said that only a brain dead moron with no functioning brain cells left would so much as look at a hard drive without backing up everything first (at least twice) and checking that the back-ups are working. And you are not a brain dead moron are you?
So back-up everything, C and D as both partitions are involved. Preferably make two separate back-ups to separate USB drives or whatever. Then try and restore a file from each back-up set to make sure that they are both viable and not corrupt.
Then follow the rest of Post 9.