RE: [Thinkpad] Re: TP T22 Missing Hard Drive space

> From: Simon Watson
>
> Thanks to John and Mike for suggesting Treesize, which I agree is a
> great little program. I think I've found the missing data. 21% of
> the hard drive is occupied by "System Volume information". I don't
> know what this is but will be doing some research. If anyone has
> any general tips about managing Windows XP in a partition can
> advise me on "System Volume Information" I'd be pleased to hear
> from them.

That's your System Restore data. You can control the size that XP uses for
System Restore using the System control panel, System Restore tab. But it
would be a bad idea to reduce it much because it would cut down the number
of restore points XP can offer. System Restore is one of XP's best features.

While you've got the System panel open, you could go to
Advanced/Performance/Settings/Advanced/Virtual memory/Change and move the
paging file onto the E: drive where I assume you've got plenty of room.

The real problem is those small partitions the hard drive is chopped up
into. You'd have a much easier time with one big NTFS partition--you
wouldn't have to do any of this tweaking. But instead of one big place to
run out of room, you've got three small ones!

Let me ask you a couple of things. Which drives are each of these folders
located on:

\Windows
\Program Files
\Documents and Settings

And, what were your goals in using the three partitions and FAT32--any
special requirements where you *must* use that particular setup, or just the
way you prefer to organize a drive, or what? Not asking to criticize, just
to get an idea of what you were looking for so I don't waste your time with
advice that isn't useful. ;-)

Aw, I'll go ahead anyway. I'm guessing it's D:\Windows, so I'll suggest
combining your D: and E: partitions, and make them NTFS while you're at it.
This is easy to do when you clone your hard drive onto a backup drive--and
if you don't have a backup drive, it gives you a good excuse to get one. (I
had *two* drives fail last week, but lost no data and less than a couple of
hours time thanks to fanatical backups.)

You can keep the E: drive letter if you combine partitions by using a SUBST
command in your Startup folder--we can talk details on that later if any of
this is of interest.

You can even combine partitions in place with a program like Partition
Magic, but I think it's a lot safer to do it as part of a complete drive
backup, so your original drive remains unchanged.

Or, if you like things the way they are and just want to fine tune it a bit,
that's cool too. (Except for the FAT32 bit--NTFS is a lot safer, OK?)

-Mike

_______________________________________________
Thinkpad mailing list
Thinkpad@stderr.org
http://stderr.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/thinkpad
Received on Thu May 15 13:01:54 2003