Need data to transfer from C to D drive

[dm2557]

On my Sony Vaio, my MS Word has begun to malfunction. Upon start-up, a warning message comes up that reads "There is insufficent memory or disk space. Word cannot display the requested font." When I close this window, another warning window pops up which reads "There is not enough memory or disk space to complete the program." When I try to open a Word file, it either does not pull up at all, or pulls up scrambled and in strange and irregular looking fonts.

My C drive has 11 GB capacity and is almost completely full: 97% with only about 350 MG left. My D drive has 17 GB and almost nothing on it. I think that is my problem.

I assumed that data would flow straight to the D drive when the C drive was full. Evidently not.

What can I do to free up space on my C drive? How can I set up my computer where data flows where there is open space?

Any help would be apreciated. By the way, my Sony uses XP.

Thanks.

DM

[Budfred]

I don't think you can set up your computer for data to "flow" to open space, but you can set your programs to place files on the D: drive or any other drive that you would like. I have Win2K installed on a 10 gig partition and I install most programs on a slightly larger partition with data on a third partition....

As for how to clear space on C:, set up folders to store things in on the D: drive and transfer files to those folders from the C: drive. You could even uninstall programs on the C: drive and reinstall them on the D: drive, but backup data first since it can be lost in the process....

[Paul Komski]

Its not clear if these are two distinct HDDs or two partitions on one HDD.

If the former and you have WinXP-PRO and a Desktop PC then it is possible to "combine" the two drives by converting them to dynamic drives. The file system must be NTFS as well. Once converted there is no going back to basic drives without a reformat though.

If these are two partitions on one drive they can be resized/merged using Partition Magic or similar. PM doesn't like doing this to a drive that is already very full so freeing up some space by transferring stuff from C to D first (if only temporarily) is really mandatory.

If you are going to mess with these setups in any way (other than directly copying files across) then ensure you backup anything of importance beforehand. This cant be stressed enough.

PS You could of course copy or otherwise ghost the contents of the smaller to the larger drive - (and reversing the master/slave if two physical drives) - thus directly creating 6gig of free space, while you consider your options.

Obviously empty your cache and temp files and recycle bin and consider turning off (or at least reducing the amount of space allocated to) system restore and also turn off any hibernation option as ways of quickly regaining some space on the relevant full(ish) partition.

... and a bit of light reading (http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=1477&page=7) with respect to "spanning" and system restore.

... and if there is a big pagefile on C it would be easy to move this to D.

[dm2557]

Paul,

Thanks for your help.

DM