Hard Drive problems!!

[matteope]

I have a 120 gig hard drive and I partioned it into 2 partitions, a 5 gig and a 95gig (lost 20 gigs somehow...) Anyway, My 5 gig drive that holds windows has recently been "shrinking" in size. It has happened before, I formated my drive and re-installed windows, but it seems to be happening again. Last time I didn't catch it till the windows alarm came up saying low disk space. It stood at 640mb yesterday (feb. 11) and 520mb today. I dont understand it, I clean up my temp files, frees up at most 5 mb. I ran Norton Antivirus with the lastest updates and it found nothing. Any ideas?

 

[airfoil]

If at all possible, I'd suggest you back your data up and delete all partitions and create new ones.

Keep in mind that a 120 GB hard drive actually contains only about 117 gigs, depending on the way you look at it.

 

[matteope]

I have about 70 gigs of stuff that I would want to keep on the one partition. Any other suggestions?

 

[matteope]

::BUMP::

 

[billyjak]

I would get Partition Magic or similar and make the 5 gig drive larger.
Windows stores in various locations, such as Documents and settings, registry,and other temp locations.
When you install certain games your store folder goes to the Documents and settings all user folder.
It may contain multiple entries in each user name field. So keeping your computer from shrinking with litttle space left on it is asking for trouble.
Windows needs sufficient room for a swap file also, when I goes below the recomended settings you will have problems, lock-ups,errors and file corruption.
I would make the windows partition at least 8-10 gigs to be on the safe side.

 

[MasterHoss]

I suspect Windows is "stealing" your capacity for its System Restore. Right click on my computer and select PROPERTIES and then select the SYSTEM RESTORE tab... (in general, it's a good rule of thumb to adjust the allowed space for System Restore fairly early after a clean install of Windows).

 

[matteope]

Is it harmful to lower it without installing a fresh copy first?

 

[imported_Phil]

Not at all, if you lower the amount of space that System Restore takes up, then Windows will simply delete older restore points to make room.

If you run the Disk Cleanup Wizard (Start-> All Programs-> Accessories-> System Tools-> Disk Cleanup), and click More Options once it's finished scanning, you can delete all but the most recent restore point for that drive. Very useful feature