Just got off the phone with my uncle, and he has an 8GB C drive, which, surprise, is filling up. I bought him some time by moving his pagefile to the G drive, which is 120GB…yeah.
Anyhow, I don’t know yet whether the 8GB drive is a small partition of the 120GB drive, or if it is a separate physical drive. Assuming either, I am going to need a tool to manipulate partitions by copying them, etc.
If it’s just a partitioning problem, I would love to find a free tool to manipulate the partition without killing its data.
Anyone used anything they like that’s reliable and free (or really cheap?)
Here’s one (ghetto) method, but two questions first:
Does the G drive have anything on it except the pagefile right now?
Are any of the in-between drive letters (D, E, F) part of the same hard drives?
If the answer to both is no, you might be able to use Windows XP or Vista’s built-in Disk Management tool (Start -> Run -> diskmgmt.msc) to erase G temporarily, Extend C: further into the unused space, and re-create G if desired.
Failing that, there ARE utilities that can repartition on-the-fly, but I’ve been out of the loop for a while so I’ll leave that to someone else.
My uncle said there were 800MB of files on the G drive before the pagefile move, but I don’t know what they are, and my uncle is just not a very savvy computer guy, I was scared talking him through moving the pagefile.
And I don’t know about any of the in-between drive letters. Having him open up disk management while I am on the phone just sounds like a recipe for disaster.
I use the GParted live CD for this sort of stuff - it’s capable of resizing partitions without destroying their contents (although you probably want to defrag them in Windows first)
An 8 gig C drive should be OK unless he’s running Vista. But then he’ll have to install programs to other drive rather than the C, save all data to the other drive rather than the C and so on.
Some power user must have set him up this way, some people love this because they can reformat the C drive and reinstall windows whenever they like without moving data around. Nice, but you shouldn’t set some guy’s uncle up this way. The uncle is going to reinstall windows approximately never.
So I went over last night and got it all sorted out. The problem is that he’s not a very advanced user, and not the only one who uses the computer, so there is no guarantee that someone else isn’t going to install something, or place some big files on his C drive.
this is a sony Vaio, and it came from the factory (5 years ago) with a fat32 8GB C drive partition. Why they would do that sort of stupid stuff is beyond me, but I converted it to NTFS, shrunk the 120GB G drive, and expanded the C drive onto some of the unused space left from that as well as some unpartitioned space left on the drive (about20GB) so now he has 2 80GB drives instead of 1 8GB, 1 120GB, and 20GB of unpartitioned space. It should take him a VERY long time before he fills up an 80GB primary partition.
Thanks to everyone for the help, especially Harmonius Discord for linking to the free tool I ended up using!