WOOP WOOP!! There she blows!
http://i71.photobucket.com/albums/i132/kevshek/ebay%20items/DSC_0185.jpg
Its there, its working, the files all seem to be intact. I cant thanks you guys enough, Brian, DaveH etc
What do i need to do now (apart from back all my stuff up!)
You can understand how relieved i am, my entire music collection (including those throwback 80s hits!), films and personal stuff was on there. Im glad to have them back.
Which brings me back to the original problem.
http://i71.photobucket.com/albums/i132/kevshek/ebay%20items/DSC_0187.jpg
As you can see, C: drive is running dangerously low on capacity, how can i give it more from D:?
Excellent. It was concerning for a while.
A few comments. Your WinXP partition is over 99% full and the D: drive is 91% full. Both are over the recommended 85%.
Regarding Partition Magic, fine to use from boot media but it can cause major issues when used from Windows. OK with WinXP but it should not be used at all with Win7 if you have 2048 sector aligned partitions.
kevshek wrote:As you can see, C: drive is running dangerously low on capacity, how can i give it more from D:?
You can't. You either need to move data off both partitions, add a second HD or upgrade to a larger HD.
OK, im backing up some stuff now to free up d:
Once thats done, i guessing something can be done with moving some space around?
Sure. You can use the PartitionWizard bootable CD. Resize D: smaller. Move the D: partition to the right so the unallocated space is now in front of the D: partition (this could take a few hours). Resize the C: partition to take up the unallocated space.
Ok, i hear you, its gonna be a long 2 step process.
Thanks again.
I'm very glad that you got everything back, I know what it's like to loose important data.
Especially now that we know PM started to actually shrink the partition, your lucky to have recovered without considerable data loss.
You should never keep all your important stuff on just one drive in the first place, you defiantly need another hard drive so you can have copies of everything you don't want to loose.
I have a friend of mine that must have over a thousand dollars and several hundred hours invested in her music collection and I told her the same thing, why risk everything when hard drives are so cheep?
Think about how you could have lost everything and what it's worth to you and then go out and get a nice big hard drive in an external case.
Glad everything worked out for you, but don't try making any more partition changes until you can backup and move some of the data off the system. In the meanwhile there must be some stuff you can delete off the C drive.
Dave
Thanks Dave,
Yeah i totally agree with what you say, thing is i never seem to have the money to buy a storage drive, but i think this has pushed me too. I think ill get a HDD which i can connect to the network, to backup my stuff from all computers.
At the oment, i only have the basics on C:, theres very little in the way of stored data, it tends to be filled up with programs. Ive went through the motions and tried to uninstall any programs i dont use, but im still outta space. Without formatting the hard drive, reallocating space is the only way i can go.
Im not technically minded when it comes to PCs and the thing i dread the most is having to reinstall everything again. Im sure there are programs out there that can help to do it, but i dont have a clue. I think one thing at a time. Ill backup my stuff first when i get my new HD drive, then ill look into removing the partition all together or at least significantly increasing the size of drive C
kevshek wrote:I think ill get a HDD which i can connect to the network, to backup my stuff from all computers.
Dave,
I think you have experience with NAS. I don't, but from what I've read they are expensive and slow compared with USB external HDs.
the thing i dread the most is having to reinstall everything again
kevshek, it would be a nightmare. You should investigate image backups.
If you have a network you may be able to achive some redundancy by keeping copies of your most important stuff on other systems in your network. At home I keep backups and copies of all my wifes important stuff on my computer and then keep backups of my computer on hers.
But ideally designating one system as the "Main" system of the house and backing up all the other systems onto it or a network drive is the ideal solution.
If you do some searches on freeing up space in XP you should find some good tips like reducing the size of system restore and deleteing old windows update uninstall folders and service pack uninstall folders.
As for backing up your system partition, a good imaging program will allow you to create system images so you could restore the whole partition and not have to reinstall any programs. Ghost is the best in my opinion but there are some free ones availible as well.
Dave
Brian_K wrote:Dave,
I think you have experience with NAS. I don't, but from what I've read they are expensive and slow compared with USB external HDs.
I don't have too much experiance with NAS but all the ones I have worked on are slow and/or very expensive.
For network storage, I just designate one system as the "server" and load it up with plenty of storage.
At home and at work I have systems that are on all the time so it's easy to transfer stuff to them over the network.
The advantage is you don't have to plug anything in, the downside is that I'm not on a gigabyte lan.
But nothing beats a big hard drive in an external case. Like you, I only use standard hard drives that give me the flexability to be able to put the hard drive in any of my systems and it's a very convienent way to backup stuff to another location.
I have extra power adapters at each location so I carry the little metal case between home and work every couple weeks to transfer images back and forth for offsite copies and redundancy.
Thats also my first reccomendation I give to people, an external USB case with a big hard drive in it.
Boy, this forum sure seems slow. Yesterday and today I been having nothing but problems trying to even get the pages to load.
Dave
DaveH wrote:
Boy, this forum sure seems slow. Yesterday and today I been having nothing but problems trying to even get the pages to load.
I've seen that in the past but it's instantaneous here today.
Hey guys,
Just wondering if you could help one last time.
Ive now got my 1TB drive and have my HD backed up. Ive used Partition Wizard and have freed up 30GB of unallocated space using it in dos mode (or whatever its called)
At this stage, everything is working fine, D drive still reading so all i have to do is move that 30GB and resize C: Drive.
Unfortunately, Partition Wizard Home Edition doesnt give me that feature, well not for free. Is there another program i can use to move this Unallocated space and merge it onto C drive?
You don't want to "merge", you just want to expand the C drive.
When you shrunk the D drive to create the unallocated space, you should have created the free space from the front of the D drive. Then the unallocated space would be "in between" the 2 partitions.
Is that how you did it?
If so, just expand the C drive into that adjacent space. The free version of partition wizzard will be able to do everything you need.
Dave
ah i see. at present the space is behind D drive, i used the resize function which left me unallocated space behind D drive.
Do i just need to move it in between C & D drive, then do the expand?
Yes.
But like partition magic you should do one step at a time, don't try to do the whole thing in one process.
Expand the D drive back to the end of the drive and click apply.
(that should go pretty quick)
Resize the D drive 30GB by dragging the front of the partition to the right. The size shown before the partition should be around 30GB and make sure the end of the partition doesn't move. Then click apply.
(I'm sorry to say that step will take quite a while because it has to move alot of data).
Then you will see the unallocated space is between the 2 partitions. Expand the C partition into that unallocated space and click apply.
(That step should be fairly quick).
You don't have to do all 3 steps in one session, just make sure it completes each step if your going to boot back into windows.
Like always, make sure your important data is backed up.
Dave
I can't boot into right now, but when your resizing partitions you will see another screen that shows something like:
Space before
total size
space after
You can "grab" the end of the partition with your mouse and drag it one way or the other to get a visual feel for how it's going to end up.
Note how the values change for space before and space after. Once you see how those values change you can type in or use the arrows to set it at 30GB
I just can't remember if partition wizzard counts one GB as 1,000 MB like a hard drive does or if it uses the correct value of 1024MB per GB. If it's the later, after you expand the D partition to the end of the drive, on the second step you want to shrink the front of the partition 30720MB.
thanks ill start that now
yeah, i dragged the rear end of D drive, didnt know you could drag the front end. Just assumed space was space.