Small 4g boot drive full, secondary drive active but?

[surreal343]

Got a new PC with a 4G HDD with xp home installed on it. The drive is full so I keep getting messages about cleaning it up. The only thing on it is the windows files. I installed a 40 G HDD from my old pc and formatted it. PC recognizes it in BIOS and disk management. Shows up as D and healthy/active. I am wondering how I can boot with the C drive and use the D drive. When I download stuff I would like it to go to the D drive automatically. Is there anything I can do or is there any opinions or recomendations on what you guys would do? I dont have a xp cd or I would just load it on the larger drive and trash the 4gig. Thanks in advance

 

[vacunita]

You could attempt to clone the 4GB unto the 40Gb and turn it into the boot drive.

Failing that, you can re-direct many things from the C: drive to the D: drive via the registry and other such editing, but you won't be able to redirect everything.

For starters right clicking on the My Documents folder, and then clicking on Properties should let you move its contents to another location. At least that will clear a bit of room.

You can then look into Internet Options, to move the Temporary Internet Files folder to another location.





----------------------------------
Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.

 

[surreal343]

The problem is that there is nothing else in there besides the OS and it is full. I can download some things and direct them to the D drive but that is a pain. Is there a way you can copy drive to drive in windows? The OS is fat32 and the other is in a different format. Will that cause problems? Is there a good cloning software you recommend?

 

[wolluf]

Go to the drive manufacturer's site for the 40GB drive - they will almost certainly have cloning software (to allow you to copy an existing disk to their disk). Once this is done, make sure you disconnect the small drive BEFORE rebooting the machine, otherwise you'll probably get drive letter problems.

The 40GB drive will also be faster - so windows performance should improve. Once new drive established you can reconnect old as slave if you want, and wipe it for storage (but probably not worth it).

 

[Freestone]

Here is some free cloning software that supports cloning to larger drives. I've never used it. Perhaps others can comment?

Product Desciption:

http://www.miray.de/products/sat.hdclone.html

Download:

http://www.miray.de/download/sat.hdclone.html

Heed wolluf's advice about removing the old drive after cloning, before rebooting.

 

[surreal343]

Thank you guys. Ill try it out in morning.