windows

[barrytibbles]

have windows 2000 installed on 4gb hard drive on my computer. have also a 40gb drive in same computer. because windows is taking up to much room on the 4gb drive, can i install it on the 40gb drive and delete it from the 4gb without causing a problem so i can have more room on it

 

[PC Hobbyist]

Yes, you can. Your first step is to back up files that you don't want to lose. To be on the safe side, do this for files from the 4 GB and the 40 GB drives. After you've burned those onto a cd, then you can start with the actual task of installing windows onto the new drive.

There are different ways of doing this and I'll just give you one suggestion of how I would do it. Keep in mind that you will be starting from scratch again on Windows and once you are done installing it, you'll have to reinstall whatever programs you had before, install peripheral devices like printers, scanners, and also drivers for things like your video card, keyboard and so forth unless you are fine with the generic drivers that come with windows.

It's up to you if you want to create a partition on the 40GB drive onto which you want to install windows. I normally recommend doing that. Depending on how many programs you plan on installing, I would do about a 10 to 15GB partition for windows in your case. There are programs out there to partition a hard drive. Do this before you start the windows installation. Make sure that no files are on that new partition, because they will all be erased when you installed windows on it.

Files in other partitions and in the 4GB drive will still be there, but it is good to back them up onto a cd just in case something goes terribly wrong and you lose all information. That happened to me only once, but I was dealing with old hard drives that were on their last leg - so not the most stable.

Once that is all taken care of, insert the windows CD in the pc and restart it. On reboot, the cd should give you the option of installing windows. Follow the steps and when asked "where" to install it, select the 10GB partition you created (or the 40GB one if your drive has no partitions). I recommend following the steps to format the partition.

After window installs and you are up and running again, you can move your files from the 4 GB onto the bigger hard drive. Then, you can reformat the 4GB hard drive so all information on it (including the previous windows installation) is wiped out and you have a fresh 4GB of space for storage.

 

[barrytibbles]

my one problem is that it dosent have a cd writer in the computer. is there another way??. also not being a computer buff i dont understand partitions. am i going to do more harm than good!!!!
thanks

 

[PC Hobbyist]

Well, let me get some more info from you to see what the best way to do it would be.

1. When you click on "my computer" how many drive letters (i.e. partitions) do you have? I assume the C: drive is from the 4 GB hard drive and you must have at least one more letter for the 40GB drive. Don't include floppy disk or cd drive letters. We are only interested in hard drive letters.

2. How much total space and free space does each letter have?

In terms of creating partitions, it is very easy if you have a program that does it all for you, but we'll get to that later.

And as far as "is it worth it to do all is or would you cause more harm than anything else" - well, it is worth it if you plan on using that computer for a while and windows is running out of space. Everything should work out fine, but you always will have the small possibility that something you wanted to keep gets erased. I have done this type of thing many many times and only once did I have problems - and like I mentioned earlier, that was likely due to the fact that I was dealing with a defective harddrive.

Now, if out of your 44GB total space, you are close to running out of space anyway, then I recommend buying a new harddrive and saying bye-bye to the little 4GB guy.

What would be ideal in your case with what you have would be the following:
1. Use the 4 GB drive as storage space (it's its own partition)

2. Have 2 partitions on the 40GB drive, one of which would be about 10 GB and would have windows installed on it. This partition would be your new C drive. The other partition (about 30GB) would be used as storage space.

3. Ideally, we would set it up so that folders like "my documents, my pictures, my favorites, my music, etc..." would be on the 30GB partition. That way in the future, you could always make changes to the C drive and even reinstall windows if you needed to, and your important data would be safe on the other partition. By default, windows places all that on the C drive, but that can be changed.

Ok, enough rambling. Let me know the answer to those first questions and well go from there.

 

[The_Other_One]

Why not just get a program such as Ghost(I know there are free ones too...) and just make a direct backup of the 4G to the 40G. That way you won't loose any files and all your programs would still work.