How do I reallocate partition space?

[m_ridzon]

About 5 years ago, I completely reformatted my harddrive and partitioned the
drives. C drive holds the operating system and is 10Gb. D drive holds my
program files and is 10Gb. E and F drives just hold ordinary user files and
have lots of free space. C drive has only 100Mb of free space remaining and
I need to correct it because it's slowing the PC down. I'm really good about
regularly cleaning my PC. I've run disk cleanup on C drive recently and
cleaned out old System Restore's as well; I've cleaned out Temp files and
even ran the File Compressor on the drive. I uninstalled a few programs that
I don't use that much (the remaining prog's are used often). Months back, I
took all of the WinXP Update Uninstall files and relocated them to F drive
(they were taking up a lot of room). I've concluded that C drive has been
filled up by software installations and downloaded software updates over the
years that can't be removed without adversely affecting the computer's
ability to run.

The only way I know to fix this problem is to wipe the PC harddrive clean
and reallocate the partition space, which means hours of time completely
rebuilding the PC. I'd rather not do that. Is there a way to go into the PC
and take some free space from E and F drive and reallocate it to C drive? Or
is it possible to buy another harddrive and somehow install it in such a way
that it is piggy-backed onto C drive? Or can an external harddrive help me
fix this in anyway?

The computer has run great for years and still runs fine aside from the fact
that it recently slowed up because of limited space on C drive. I'd prefer
not to reformat it. There's no reason to reformat the harddrive other than
this space problem. Any input?

OS: WinXP SP3

Thanks,
M Ridzon

 

[Mike Hall - MVP]

About 5 years ago, I completely reformatted my harddrive and partitioned
the
drives. C drive holds the operating system and is 10Gb. D drive holds my
program files and is 10Gb. E and F drives just hold ordinary user files
and
have lots of free space. C drive has only 100Mb of free space remaining
and
I need to correct it because it's slowing the PC down. I'm really good
about
regularly cleaning my PC. I've run disk cleanup on C drive recently and
cleaned out old System Restore's as well; I've cleaned out Temp files and
even ran the File Compressor on the drive. I uninstalled a few programs
that
I don't use that much (the remaining prog's are used often). Months back,
I
took all of the WinXP Update Uninstall files and relocated them to F drive
(they were taking up a lot of room). I've concluded that C drive has been
filled up by software installations and downloaded software updates over
the
years that can't be removed without adversely affecting the computer's
ability to run.

The only way I know to fix this problem is to wipe the PC harddrive clean
and reallocate the partition space, which means hours of time completely
rebuilding the PC. I'd rather not do that. Is there a way to go into the
PC
and take some free space from E and F drive and reallocate it to C drive?
Or
is it possible to buy another harddrive and somehow install it in such a
way
that it is piggy-backed onto C drive? Or can an external harddrive help
me
fix this in anyway?

The computer has run great for years and still runs fine aside from the
fact
that it recently slowed up because of limited space on C drive. I'd
prefer
not to reformat it. There's no reason to reformat the harddrive other
than
this space problem. Any input?

OS: WinXP SP3

Thanks,
M Ridzon

Install a large second internal IDE drive.. partition it, allocating 30gb
for what will become the primary partition.. use Acronis Disk Director or
similar utility to clone the OS to the new drive.. re-install all programs
which now reside on D, but install them to C..

Now go to Disk Management and partition and format the rest of the new
drive. Move all data to the new drive, and then format and repartition the
older drive into more usable sizes..

 

[Timothy Daniels]

[......] Is there a way to go into the PC and take some
free space from E and F drive and reallocate it to C drive?
Or is it possible to buy another harddrive and somehow
install it in such a way that it is piggy-backed onto C drive?
Or can an external harddrive help me fix this in anyway?
[....]

OS: WinXP SP3

As Mike Hall said, the easiest way is to clone the OS's
partition to another HD that has a larger partition allocated
for it. Keep in mind that many cloning utilities can clone the
contents of a smaller partition to a larger partition. In doing
this, the cloner must have the ability to clone partitions
individually (as opposed to cloning the entire hard disk
contents). Casper (currently on version 5) can do this. I
don't think Acronis's True Image can do this, although it can
make image files of individual partitions. I think Symantc's
Ghost can also clone individual partitions. So if you have a
cloner like Casper or Ghost, you can just set up the 2nd HD
with the partition sizes allocated as you wish, and then clone
the individual partitions from the old HD to the new HD, and
then connect the new HD in the place of the old HD. You
can then re-format the old HD and re-partition it for use as
backup storage space.

*TimDaniels*

 

[Timothy Daniels]

[....] many cloning utilities can clone the
contents of a smaller partition to a larger partition. In
doing this, the cloner must have the ability to clone
partitions individually (as opposed to cloning the entire
hard disk contents). Casper (currently on version 5)
can do this. [....]

FYI, I often use Casper to clone large partitions to
smaller partitions. It works as long as the contents of
the larger source partition can fit in the smaller destination
partition. That comes in handy when I'm making backup
clones of my working OS and putting them on a large
hard drive along with previously made clones. The
OS resides in a 40GB partition, but it only takes up
28GB, so I can squeeze it into one of the four 30GB
partitions on the 120GB backup HD. And yes, each
clone is bootable.

*TimDaniels*