Hard drive problem

[bballnut]

I have a old sony computer that has a 80 gig hard drive that is partitioned into a 20gb boot drive (c) and a 60 gb storage (d). I continually run out of space on the boot drive when installing programs, etc. I tried installing all new programs to the D: drive but some programs don't give me the option on which drive to install onto. therefor I run out of space.
Can I make an image of the drive onto another drive and remove the partition (I have a 120 gb slave drive installed also).
Any suggestions? how would you do it?

Thanks

[redwudz]

You could use a program like Acronis True Image and 'clone' the boot partition to the new drive. Or you could use a program like Partition Magic to remove the second partition. I admit I haven't done either, so others may have better ideas.

If you have the OS disc, I would just back up your data and repartition and reformat your boot drive. A clean install of Windows is usually the best way to clean it all up, IMO. The 80GB boot drive should be big enough for your OS and programs.

[wtsinnc]

Hello. If your boot drive is either a Seagate or a Maxtor, download from www.seagate.com either the Seatools or the Maxblast HDD installation software (either version is absolutely free). This is really a rebadged version of Acronis and will allow for cloning your drive to a larger hard drive and allows for "proportional" cloning; that is, your 20gb and 60gb partitions would become 40gb and 120gb partitions if you were to clone to a 160gb drive. If you chose to clone to your 120gb drive, the partitions would be 30gb and 90gb. Any data and/or partition(s) which already exist on the target drive will be deleted, so consider this if you wish to clone to a drive containing data. All of the numbers mentioned above are approximate, but illustrative of the process. If you already own Acronis, you can, of course, skip the download process. The free software from Seagate works only if your source or target drive is a Seagate or Maxtor and omits some of the other tools found in Acronis. If you need a good and free partitioning application, go to www.sourceforge.com and download "GPARTED" , an open-source program that gives numerous optiojns for adding, deleting, resizing, etc. a hard drive. Good luck !

[EsCee]

Hi,

I've used partition magic and it's quite easy to use. The process does take a while but it does work well.

Now a day, many application will install certain files into your Program Files folder even if the main application is located on another drive/partition. Having just 20 GB partition for drive C is just too small. If you can, make the C partition 50 GB, IMHO.

In case things may go wrong, you should back up your important data first.

S.C.

[wtsinnc]

An addenda to my previous post:
The Seagate HDD cloning software available for download is "Discwizard", not "Seatools" which is also free but is used for diagnostics and such. See below.

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&name=downloads&vgnextoid=51e092db8a...00dd04090aRCRD

[fritzi93]

I've made bootable clones from time to time with DataLifeGuard (DLG) from WD, and Maxtor's MaxBlast (MB) both free. They're remarkably similar, hell they're really the same, and I never could install both on the same comp at the same time. It's simple, choose the bootable clone option and custom partition, where you set the sizes. Make sure you select bootable clone, it's essential. The utility will complain if the brand of the drive is different from the utility, but will do the job anyway, so it makes no difference. Never had a problem.

I assume the Seagate utility is the same. I don't have the latest versions, so I don't know about "proportional" cloning. [shrugs] Just use custom partition and set the sizes yourself. JMO. After you do that and swap out the drives so the clone is boot drive, you can do as you please with the old one. Copy over data, repartition, whatever.

[bballnut]

Thanks guys.
I will try some of these later this week.