OS partition too small?

Hi Folks,

A while back I was asking for advice on OS partition size and the general consensus of opinion seemed to be 50gb for Windows XP partition is plenty, so I gave it 55gb.

I am now in trouble with my young'un as he has run out of space on C:

I've checked it out and it's all programs. 16gb for Warcraft alone plus about 10 other games taking up the rest of the space.

I've run ccleaner but that saves less than 1gb and there's nothing else to uninstall. What can I do?

Thanks.

 

I would see how much space the System Restore is holding as well as the Recycle Bin. Both can suck up alot of space. I have my System Restore set to approx. 1gb and my Recycle Bin is set small as well. System Restore might be taking up as much as 5-10gb. If you set it smaller, you would not be able to restore from point farther back in time, but in reality, if it is more than 2 restore points old, I don't feel that it is useful.
Just my thought.

 

Do you have other partitions on the HDD avail? Can you copy WoW over there and free up some room. Personally I don't like partitioning as you run into these exact sort of problems. If you want another OS get another HDD as they are relatively cheap nowadays.

 

I find partitioning very useful so that OS can be imaged and restored separately to data. I have an image made after a fresh install, including all most-used progam installations/registrations, email, browser etc so a nice clean Windows install can be achieved sijmply by restoring the OS partition. This saves hours of program setup.

Yes there is another 180gb partition on the drive which is almost empty at present.
I was advised on here though that all programs must be installed to the OS partition. If it is possible to install programs on the other partition then problem solved... but if not, is it possible to resize the 2 partitions without losing data?

If not, my next idea is to reformat the drive, then restore from the 55gb backup image which will create a new 55gb partition, then presumably it would be possible to resize it using software since there is nothing else on the drive at that point?

(is there a free program, or trial software that could accomplish this?)

EDIT
I see that 'Easeus-partition-manager' free for home use looks like it will do the resizing without data loss.... anyone used this before?

 

Easeus is pretty good/safe but I believe the free version will only increase the size of a partition if there is adjacent free space. So you would have to copy anything off the data partition and then delete it, and then add to the OS partition.

Or try shrinking the data partition (locating the resulting free space next to the OS partition) and then increase the OS partition. I haven't use Easeus for a while so not sure if dictating how the partition is shrink is possible or not. The user interface is not that intuitive but I think you can drag around the bar graphs to determine where the space is made. You can experiment with the program without actually committing to the changes.

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I believe when people say that 25-50gb is plenty for an XP partition they mean that programs as large as games should be installed on the data partition. I'm not a gamer but am sure many people here are so they should be able to give you tips on that.

 

Well many will normally create 10GB partitions for different OS (e.g. WinXP, Vista, Win7(i.e. Multi-booting)) but then have a normal "shared" area for DATA and program files. So ideally the 10GB (more than enough for a patched OS) partition can be readily copied and your intact OS preserved.

You can try simply cutting and pasting a small "program" but it will probably create "registry" issues now, but I am sure you will be able to copy WoW (don't delete it off C: until you definitely have it running on D. So maintain 2 copies until you definitely have it running from both locations.

The only problem you face by having programs on "different" partitions is you maybe increasing access times from the different areas of the HDD. Maybe you need to clarify "why this person suggested such a large partition?"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_partitioning