Low hard drive space. HELP!!

[lengtche]

The C drive on my computer is low on hard drive space. It is only 20gig and has my xp operating system. i can't defrag because it has less than 15% space. my computer also has another D drive with 20gig and plenty of space and an external drive with 80gig. I have removed programs and deleted files to free up enough room to defrag but somehow it keeps filling up. Is there a way to transfer operating system files to another drive? Open for any suggestions.

[Rick]

The OS files should stay on C

What you can do is set the temp folder default to D:
Also you can uninstall some of your programs other than the OS and reinstall them onto the D: drive

When doing the install just change the default from C:\programfiles/whatever to
d:whatever

All that needs to be changed is the drive letter in the path
The folders will be created by the installation program

[mjc]

Also check things like how full your Recycle bin is, where and what size the pagefile is...

Pagefile.sys is one of the biggest offenders when set to Windows defaults, as it can consume large portions of drive space, quickly. System Restore is another heavy space consumer.

For the pagefile, you really don't more than twice your installed RAM...and that is way too much, unless you've only got 128 MB or something. If D is a separate physical drive, consider moving the pagefile to it.

I believe that XP defaults to 10% of your drive for System Restore...that is 2 GB in your case...not needed. That is enough space to hold several years worth of restore points. 500 MB is more than enough.

[Sylvander]

1. Have you moved [almost] ALL your data files off C:?

e.g. "My Documents" can be moved off.
I also moved:
Windows Address Book.
OE emails for all identities.
The Desktop folder.
IE Favourites & Temporary Internet Files.
Firefox Profile.
Acerose Password Vault auto-backup files.

2. "somehow it keeps filling up"
It's good to study space usage of various partitions using some suitable program.
I have:
(a) The PORTABLE SpaceMonger 2.1.2 Pre 3 build 1574 Beta (http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/Hard-Disk-Utils/SpaceMonger.shtml).
A marvelous little thing that will [for example] dynamically re-draw the changing use of space.
Send something [a file?] to the Recycle Bin and watch the file shrink and the bin grow.
It nags you to buy, but so far that hasn't made we want rid of it.

(b) WinDirStat (http://windirstat.info/) also gives a good visual display of usage.

[classicsoftware]

If this is a sudden problem and you have not been constantly installing programs or adding data, this is indicative of a hardware problem. Dr. Watson can fill your hard drive with a log file. I have seen them grow as large as 30 GB.

[Paul Komski]

With some decent housekeeping, as already indicated, you should be able to free up quite a bit of space. If C and D are on the same hard drive you could also resize D and slide/move it (now as a small partition) to the end of the hard drive and then resize C to occupy the liberated space. This can be done with BiNG (in my sig) but since any repartitioning is a potential risk to data you should first make a verified image file of C: onto your exteral drive. BiNG will do this as well and it allows you to reinstate C if the resizing runs into any problems.