3gb space left on my C Drive

S

Stevery

New Member
Hi all,

I bought a PC a few years ago which came with a 111gb hard drive and a second 1TB hard drive.
the C drive which is the smaller spaced driver is now almost full and I want to know if its possible to switch them over so the main C drive is the larger one?? I don't know why it was installed with the smaller C drive?

Any suggestions are much appreciated thanks.
 
P

_Pete_

Active Member
You could clone the smaller drive on to the larger drive but you would need cloning software to do that and you would need enough space on the smaller drive to install the cloning software. the reason that your drives are that way round is because the bigger is supposed to be used for file storage but everything default stores to the system drive. the easier option would be transfer all your personal files from the smaller drive to the larger drive then delete them from the smaller drive. You will need to back up those files first, which is something you should have bene doing anyway, to a completely different location such as an external USB drive. Sorry this stuff isn't easy. To store any future files on the larger hard drive you will have to tell the various programs you are using to do that. It will not happen automatically.
 
Punk

Punk

Moderator
Staff member
Are you sure you have two separate HDDs?

It is odd that you have a 111GB HDD, must be an SSD. If that's the case, what you should do is have the OS installed on the SSD, then your programs/files on the HDD. SSDs are faster than HDDs hence why you install the OS on it.
 
S

Stevery

New Member
I've tried clearing the C drive as much as I can - Any games / files I download are saved and stored to the second one which is about 650gb free of 1tb now. I think quite a lot of the C drive space is filled with windows update files and other types that I wouldn't know if I can remove.
Just to confirm they both are HDD

@Pete - How much space do you think I would need for the cloning software and would it be relatively simple to do?
 
johnb35

johnb35

Administrator
Staff member
Check the location of the pictures, music, downloads, documents folder inside your user folder. You can change the location of this to your bigger drive.

Go into your user folder, right click on pictures folder and click on properties, click on location tab and see where its stored at. If C drive then change location to second drive. Do the same for music, downloads, and documents. If you have a lot of music and pictures, they do take up a lot of space.
 
P

_Pete_

Active Member
Your Windows folder, which will contain all the update files, registery and everything else Windows should be approximately 15.5 Gb. The rest of the drive will be program files which automatically get installed on the "C" drive. Unless you tell programs and files to go to the "D" drive then they will all install on the "C" drive. Some programs will only install on the "C" drive. Having said that I have never filled a system drive of that size with just program files. I have to admit that I have baulked at buying an SSD drive because of their very small capacity unless you are prepared to pay more than the whole computer will cost you. If you have 2 hard disk drives then the small configuration drive being used as a system drive is very unusual. Even if you only have one drive that is partitioned a Tb drive would normally be partitioned with a bigger primary partition.

Anyway either way I'm still going to bang on about backing your files up if you are not already doing it. Believe me I know how important this is from bitter experience. The cloning software I use is Macrium Reflect and the installed program takes up les than a gigabyte. I have used Symantic (used to be Norton) Ghost in the past but it's not free. Macrium is not free if you are going to use it for business but for home use it is free. Again I am going on about backing up. Before you embark on any hard drive "mucking about" back up your personal files. Doing this sort of stuff can so very easily go wrong.
 
Agent Smith

Agent Smith

Well-Known Member
I use a very small SSD as my main drive as well in the desktop. I install all programs on the second 1 TB drive. You do this when the program asks you where to install. Just create a Programs folder on the second drive. I've also moved my music and pictures to the 1 TB as well. Only very small programs and Flight Simulator is on the SSD.

You could try using WinDirStat and see what is consuming space. Also run System Ninja and Ccleaner to help free up temp files, etc. You might be very surprised at how much crap System Ninja finds over Ccleaner. But I do run both periodically.
 
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