hard drive almost full

[_chachi]

i have a 12gb hard drive (huge when i bought it!) which is almost full. i'm trying to clear it out, but i'm having trouble finding out where all the space is being used. windows directory has 2gb, program files has 2gb and my documents has 1gb. how can i easily figure out where the other 7 gb is?

[Scarecrow]

i have a 12gb hard drive (huge when i bought it!) which is almost full. i'm trying to clear it out, but i'm having trouble finding out where all the space is being used. windows directory has 2gb, program files has 2gb and my documents has 1gb. how can i easily figure out where the other 7 gb is?

Check your temp files and clear them out under your windows directory.
clear your internet temp. files as well.

In your my docs folder, go through and see what you want to keep or get rid off. You may need to burn a few CD's or DVDs to store your info.

Program files, see if you have anything installed that you don't use or need and uninstall them.

These are just a start, but I would go to your temp files first and clear them out.

[Toon³]

Have you defragged your drive recently. If you've never done it then you will have alot of space being taken up by nothing.

[Scarecrow]

Have you defragged your drive recently. If you've never done it then you will have alot of space being taken up by nothing.
Agreed, but defrag after you have removed what you don't want or need.

[Grouchy]

If you have Windows 2000/XP/2003 run a check on the \Documents and Settings folder. "My Documents", "Temp", "Temporary Internet Files" and all sorts of goodies for each user on the system are located in that mess.

Theoretically your C:\ drive should only have three directories:
\Documents and Settings
\Program Files
\Windows

Some games like to install themselves in directories not on that list and most current games take up hefty amounts of space.

Still, follow the above advice.

[_chachi]

do i need to check my drive for bad sectors before i defrag? is the defrag utility in xp decent or should i use another one?

[Scarecrow]

do i need to check my drive for bad sectors before i defrag? is the defrag utility in xp decent or should i use another one?
The XP defrag is good enough, I forget the name of the company MS bought but I used to use their product for NT.

Have you cleared out your temp files and such yet? Do that before defragging.

[Own Goal Hat-Trick]

just buy, say, a 300gb or so external hard drive and consider the problem solved.

[URwormfood]

do i need to check my drive for bad sectors before i defrag? is the defrag utility in xp decent or should i use another one?

I would just for the heck of it... It will take you awhile if you havent done it in a long time.

Post above is a good idea..invest in another hard drive, if you know how to install one..or easy to install a portable HD **for those who dont want to open and check out the guts of their machines.

Also.. do a search of multimedia files...if you have and movie files or such...those suckers can take 300mb and up of space...if you have some you want copy to a cd or dvd if you have one...delete the rest.

1. search and clean unwanted files. (.tmp files..media files. even image files. unwanted programs.)
2. do a disk cleanup.
3. system scan
4. defrag...((make sure you have no programs running in background.)) do a full defrag...and wait..it will take awhile but you can expect depending on your HD about *1-2GB or more to be free. (*depends on what junk you got rid of.)

~worm~

[Grouchy]

One thing I didn't think of that might account for a fraction of space would be the swap file.

One thing about external drives, in my opinion they are worthless unless you have USB 2 on your computer. If your PC isn't current, it might have USB1.1 which is much slower than USB2; to the point of being downright annoyingly slow. If you have movies or anything a around a CD in size, record in to a CD. Movies and music belong on CD/DVD. Just my opinion, though. I use external storage for backups, installs for software, and images. I also have a couple "thumb" or "keychain" usb drives for home/work/friends/etc.

[_chachi]

i cleaned out a bunch of files and ran the xp cleandisk (or whatever the name is) utility and i now have 3 gb free space! nice. i'm going to defrag tomorrow during dinner.

[techin]

http://www.hushpage.com/FoSi/fosi.html

I use this to visually check where huge amounts of data are. There are probably other programs out there that do something similar, but really I don't think it's much different than searching through Explorer.

[noaihmtch]

just buy, say, a 300gb or so external hard drive and consider the problem solved.

exactly what i was going to say. the most constructive opinion here.

[spejic]

Just to note, defraging a disk doesnt' really save any space. It just organizes the bits and pieces in better order.

One thing that can really eat a lot of disk space is having lots and lots of small files. Each file might only be 1 or 2 K, but there is a minimum block size on the hard disk, and each of those might be taking up many, many times that in actual real estate depending on how your disk is formatted. Zip them up together if you don't use them often.

You can also try uninstalling Windows components you don't use. Click on the "Add/Remove Programs" icon in the Control Panel. In the next dialog box, click on "Add/Remove Windows Components". You should get a list of things. Unclicking "MSN Explorer" will save you an easy 20 megabytes, and fax services another 4. And if you highlight "Accessories and Utilities" and then click the "Details..." button, you can then uncheck the Windows Games and save yourself more than 12 megabytes. Highlighting "Accessories" in the same list, click "Details..." again and you can get rid of some small applications. "Character Map" allmost takes up 1 megabyte, and what it does Word does anyway. There you go - 37 free megabytes. Many large applications (like Word) will also let you uninstall portions of the program you don't need, freeing space. When you install programs, get into the habit of always doing a custom install to see exactly what they are putting in your machine. And it sure won't hurt to go over the list of installed programs and uninstall ones you don't use anymore.

When you are in Explorer, bringing up the properties of a folder will compute the size of everything in that folder. This is a good way to hunt down where the extra space is going.

And if you are getting an external drive, Firewire so rocks over USB. Given the age of you machine, I would be careful of getting anything over 120 gigabytes. Lots of older chipsets (including my own) don't recognize anything over that, so you just bought space you can't use.

[Chiquitibum]

real advice:


format c: /q

[jec1]

yeah reformat

[Scarecrow]

A better answer
http://www.novell.com/linux/suse/