My C partition is running out of room

[7beauties]

My C partition is one of two 250GB HDD I have. I have a third, 500GB HDD. However, my C partition is filling up fast with only 66GB to spare. I have plenty of room on my two other drives, so I purchased Acronis Disk Director Suite because it promised the ability to resize partitions across multiple drives. It doesn't work. What can I do short of purchasing another HDD and cloning my C drive over to it? I would appreciate any help. Thank you.

 

[VirtualLarry]

You cannot span partitions over physical drives. I don't know whatever gave you that idea.

 

[TC91]

you could do raid0... I wouldnt really recommend it though

 

[SickBeast]

You could do a JBOD raid (just big old disk).

 

[RebateMonger]

I'm not understanding your problem, unless you have installed 250 GB of PROGRAMS on your C: drive. Why can't you just move or redirect data to folders on the other drives?

If you want larger capacity and want to only deal with a single drive letter, you can essentially move the entire capacity of the other drives into the C: drive by using Volume Mount Points.

 

[Nothinman]

You cannot span partitions over physical drives. I don't know whatever gave you that idea.

Sure you can, even Windows will let you concatenate volumes like that. However it's not recommended because there's no redundancy however it's easier to recover from than RAID0 because if one drive dies you still have the other data since it's not striped.

 

[chizow]

Originally posted by: RebateMonger
I'm not understanding your problem, unless you have installed 250 GB of PROGRAMS on your C: drive. Why can't you just move or redirect data to folders on the other drives?

If you want larger capacity and want to only deal with a single drive letter, you can essentially move the entire capacity of the other drives into the C: drive by using Volume Mount Points.

Yep, I'd look into doing something like this.

Another thing you can do is move your entire My Documents/Download folder to a different HDD, which XP and Vista place under C:\ by default. My Download folder by itself was getting close to 100GB (tons of both large and small files like drivers, demos, patches etc.) and it noticeably bogged my system down when I went to open it up, as the contents of the folder were read. Sometimes it would lock my entire system up for extended periods, which was very annoying. Once I moved it onto its own disk, overall system performance has been much improved and opening the folder doesn't hang the system sporadically anymore either.

Here's a good walkthrough link:
Moving My Documents default location

 

[scruffypup]

you still have 66 gb to spare which is a lot,...

you can point new installations to a folder on another harddrive (it will then install minimal files and registry entries on the c partition). All images, video, music and etc can easily be moved to another harddrive without issues,.. if you have a lot in the documents folder like someone mentioned,... I would just cut and paste the non essential stuff over to a new folder on another harddrive,... no need to move the folder itself and all that,...

I mean it really is a simple thing of creating folders like these on the root of the third drive and cut and paste
music
video
pictures
drivers

Now if you have 3000 programs installed,.. next time you install one create a folder on another harddrive "games" for instance and then instead of pointing to c:\windows\program files\,..... point it to e:\games\,...

Just some thoughts,.. and a lot easier\more reliable than spanning drives and such.

 

[7beauties]

Thank you everyone for your replies. I shall investigate "volume mount points" and migrating "My Documents" and everything non-OS related to another drive. You have all been very helpful and I'm very grateful. BTW, you're being more helpful than people have been in other forums where I posted the same message.

 

[chizow]

Originally posted by: scruffypup
if you have a lot in the documents folder like someone mentioned,... I would just cut and paste the non essential stuff over to a new folder on another harddrive,... no need to move the folder itself and all that,...

Having to constantly manage those files in different directories kinda defeats the purpose of having them all in the same place to begin with. For something like My Documents or Downloads, I don't want to have to also remember if it was on the old or new install. Also, by moving the entire folder, you don't have to keep micro-managing each folder, as all future downloads and saves automatically point to your new folder location.

Originally posted by: 7beauties
Thank you everyone for your replies. I shall investigate "volume mount points" and migrating "My Documents" and everything non-OS related to another drive. You have all been very helpful and I'm very grateful. BTW, you're being more helpful than people have been in other forums where I posted the same message.

Sounds good, let us know how it works out for you.