Sudden crashing and memory/HD space question

[leatherface1974]

System Specs-
Mobo- Biostar M7NCD
HD- Seagate, 80GB
Ram- 512mb Crucial
Gfx Card- eVGA Nvidia 5700fx 256mb
OS- Win98
PSU 350watts

Hi all-

I have recently encountered a problem while playing Star Wars Galaxies and was wondering if something is actually wrong with my system (if this is lengthy or in the wrong folder, i appologize)- Here's the deal-

When I built the system several months ago, I decided to partion the Harddrive into a "c" and "d". I miscalculated and only gave myself about 4gb on the "c" drive (which has the OS and is the boot drive). The rest of my 76gb is my "d" drive where I store all my games and such. About 2 months ago, I started getting a message advising that I was out of space on drive "c". I would do a quick clean (deleted temp files and temp internet files) and that would ususally be ok. It should be said that after this, I generally had about 175mb of free space left on my 'c' drive.

2 days ago, I accidentally infected my system with the w95CIH virus. I was able to remove it, but noticed that I was getting the 'drive c is out of space' popup much more often, and when I checked it, there was nothing to clear up. I checked my 'c' drive space and saw that i was down to about 750kb of space. I was able to shut down a few apps and noticed that 'c' then went back to around 130mb free space.

I started playing Star Wars Galaxies and everytime I got into a heavily populated area my game crashed right to the desktop. This is a known issue, however, I never had that problem at all in the 5 months I've been playing. I rebooted and the game ran fine again until I got into another heavily populated area. This time what happened was a blue screen popped up before the crash and the message said "Your system memory sources are extremely low, Antivirus may not be able to run" then it crashed to desktop. I checked my 'c' space again and it was around 130kb.

Ok, time to bring this all home- Even though my game info is stored on the 'd' drive (72gb of space), am I experiencing all these crashes because of the low 'c' space or could that virus have affected my setup? As soon as I realized the virus was there, I found the 'cure' to kill the virus, then ran Norton to clean everything up. If this 'system memory resource is low' message is due to the limited space left on 'c' drive, is there a way to repartion my HD without losing everything on the 'd' drive? I was thinking of upgrading to WinXP soon- if I install that, would it allow me to repartion the HD without losing any prior info?

Any help/info would be greatly appreciated.

[ski]

Even 175 MB of available HD space is on the low side, and your comment "that would usually be ok" appears to confirm it.

You will need 3rd party software, like Partition Magic, to repartition the HD without losing any data or applications.
Another option is to save all critical files onto CD's or DVD's, and then repartition and reformat the HD, install Win XP, reinstall all applications, updates, etc., and transfer the critical files back to the HD.

[ziba-june]

One option is to move some of your software from c: to D:. you could create a folder in your D: drive and remove your software one by one from c: and reinstall them in that directory (out of 4 gig of space on c: you can free 2 or 3 gig).

another option is to move you SWAP file from C: to D: and since you have 512MB of RAM, you might get something between 512 to 800MB of free space on your C:.
Start|CTRL Panel|System|Performance|Vertual Memory and choose the manual settings. Select drive d: and choose between 0 mb to 1024 mb(twice as much as your physical memory)

[ski]

One option is to move some of your software from c: to D:. you could create a folder in your D: drive and remove your software one by one from c: and reinstall them in that directory
ziba-june,
Applications that are moved from the C partition to the D partition may not run properly since they are listed in the Registry as being installed on the C partition.

[Sylvander]

Keep your C: partition as it is.
I use Win98 and my C: partition is only 1,800 MB and I have no problems.

Here's some standard advice I keep handy.
The part I've coloured blue would be particularly helpful to you.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
RECOVER USING BACKUPS
The easy way to recover from all software [including configuration] problems [without even having to discover the cause], is:

1) As you proceed forward in time, make backups of everything on your C: drive.
Do this at regular intervals, particularly before making software changes [un/installing programs or changing configuration] and keep a log of all this.
2) When you hit trouble caused by a bad configuration change and no hardware or software changes have been made, [use "scanreg /restore" in Win98, or a restore point in WinXP, to] restore a previous good configuration.
3) When the trouble involves more than just the configuration, but involves the files [including the configuration perhaps] but no hardware has been changed [this is important because the software must match the hardware], then:
----------------------------------------------------------
Re-format the C: drive and restore your latest good backup.
----------------------------------------------------------
The software will "jump back" to the way it was when the PC worked.
If this doesn’t fix things, then it probably is not a software problem but a hardware problem

It helps if you keep the C: drive "lean & mean".
I move as much as possible off the C: drive [and keep it as small as possible].
The "Windows" & "Program Files" folders account for 95% of the used space on my C: drive.
All the data that changes day by day [or are considered vital] are re-homed on another physical drive [although another partition would do].
When I "jump back" I still have up to date:
a. My Documents. [Use “TweakUI” to move their home]
b. E-mails for all identities. [use the email client to move their home]
c. Internet Explorer Favourites. [Use “TweakUI” to move their home]
d. Temporary Internet Files. [use the browser (Internet Explorer) to move them]
e. Re-home the Windows Address Book as shown here http://tinyurl.com/24q6l . Use the key “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\WAB\WAB4\Wab FileName” to specify its new address. [Its normal home address [in Win98] is C:\WINDOWS\Application Data\Microsoft\Address Book.]
f. Any other storage of data files you wouldn’t want to “jump back”.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
I'd echo the advice to use a fixed-size swap file off the C: drive [ideally on another physical drive].

Also use:
OpenExpert from http://www.baxbex.com/downloads.html
to study the space usage and eliminate unnecessary space-hogging files/folders.

If you have ZoneAlarm it may be using 250 MB or more unnecessarily, and that can be eliminated.

I resize my partitions by re-partitioning & re-formatting, then restoring my backups to the new partition sizes.

[ziba-june]

quote:</font><hr>One option is to move some of your software from c: to D:. you could create a folder in your D: drive and remove your software one by one from c: and reinstall them in that directory <hr></blockquote><br />

quote:</font><hr>ziba-june,
Applications that are moved from the C partition to the D partition may not run properly since they are listed in the Registry as being installed on the C partition.
<hr></blockquote><br />


SKI,

Removing software from a drive will clear the enteries in the Registry and reinstalling them in other drive/directory will take care of everything in the Registry.

[ski]

Removing software from a drive will clear the enteries in the Registry and reinstalling them in other drive/directory will take care of everything in the Registry.

ziba-june,
My mistake. I misread your previous post, and thought that you were recommending simply transferring the applications from one partition to another, instead of uninstalling and reinstalling them.
Sorry about that.