C and D drive switched

[siegs07]

my friend had me go over to his house the other day and try and help him find a way to get rid of crap on his computer so the hard drive wasn't full anymore. he has a really nice desktop and i had a hard time believing that his hard drive was full since i know he doesn't listen to that much music or download movies and he just uses his computer for basic internet and word processing stuff with the casual itunes downloads. i check his computer info and his C drive was 15 gigs and full and his D drive is 140 gigs and obviously empty. somehow they're backwards! his computer is already a year or two old so i think having him send it back is not an option, so for now i deleted crap he doesn't need and just transfered his itunes to the D drive. has anyone ever heard of this before? is there even convenient and easy way to fix it? can he just take it to a computer maintenance store and have them swap the drives or what? i just told him they screwed up when they made it and he's probably out of luck. any suggestions, comments, or interesting similar stories would be great!

[siegs07]

just saw that disk partition sticky and i guess i never realized that D drives were for media and such. i always though it was the other way around. so should i just transfer all of his media, games, and... (what else?) over to the D? should i leave all his programs on his C? how much effort will it be setting his system up so the default is that everything saves in the D drive? this is a pretty new concept to me!

[Andavari]

Things like music, movies, downloads, and backups should go on the secondary partition drive D. You can even configure Windows to know where moved folders are at, such as D:\My Music, etc.

 

The reason to move things to drive D is; Should Windows ever need to be reinstalled nothing will be lost so long as he's only formatting and installing Windows on drive C. I'd recommend doing it sooner than later.

 

Things like installed program files can stay on drive C so there's no need to uninstall them and then reinstall them, unless of course he's really pressed for disk space on C, however moving music, and video files should free up allot of space.

 

Note in some rare instances there are some programs that won't even work on a secondary partition, thus those programs have to be on the C drive - why I don't know however I did ran into that problem about two years ago.

[BrownSugar]

Things like installed program files can stay on drive C so there's no need to uninstall them and then reinstall them, unless of course he's really pressed for disk space on C, however moving music, and video files should free up allot of space.

 

Unless I'm missing something, if he reinstalls his OS, he'll wipe out the registry, and then he'll have to reinstall all programs which loaded numerous registry strings and other files in the Windows or Windows]System32 directory. In very few instances will his main programs run without reinstalling. Programs that were unzipped and not installed using an exe script will probably still run. Other programs like MS Office, and browsers (and most Audio/video programs) will have to be reinstalled.

 

The poster said that one drive was 15 gigs and another was 140 gigs. Do you mean partitions or do you mean two, separate, distinct hard drives? Check the system device manager or run a tool like the Belarc Advisor to find out.

 

 

Secondly, what drive is the computer booting from? Siegs07, why do you think they're backwards? If the setup is correct, and the computer is booting from the D: drive, I don't see the problem? What drive has Windows on it and Documents and Settings?

 

Is it possible that the C drive was the old boot drive, and when the new drive was installed, it wasn't partitioned and just was granted the D: letter during formatting and Windows installation?

 

The disk partition sticky you read recommends separating the drive into 2 partitions. I would go even further with drives over 120 mg. I would separate it into at least 4 partitions and larger drives into 5 or more. The reason is for a) defrag and antivirus/malware scanning and ease of sorting files.

Defragging and av/malware scanning is faster when you can set it up for smaller partitions and if you set up separate partitions for video, audio, graphic images, data, and backups, it's much easier to find your files. I would even set up a separate partition for ghost imaging, and another one in case you want to dual boot at some time in the future (Linux or DOS).

 

What you may want to do is get a program like Partition Magic and partition the rest of the free space on the D drive or extended partition (please clarify which one it is).

 

There are other factors to take into account. If the computer is manufactured by Dell, they install hidden partitions for their Dell tools, and you have to be careful not to erase it if the owner wants them. I personally always reformat any hard drive that has them. If the user can be tought how to back up his OS drive and programs using an imaging program like Acronis True Image or Norton Ghost, it's much better than the Dell system backups.

[siegs07]

Unless I'm missing something, if he reinstalls his OS, he'll wipe out the registry, and then he'll have to reinstall all programs which loaded numerous registry strings and other files in the Windows or Windows]System32 directory. In very few instances will his main programs run without reinstalling. Programs that were unzipped and not installed using an exe script will probably still run. Other programs like MS Office, and browsers (and most Audio/video programs) will have to be reinstalled.

 

The poster said that one drive was 15 gigs and another was 140 gigs. Do you mean partitions or do you mean two, separate, distinct hard drives? Check the system device manager or run a tool like the Belarc Advisor to find out.

Secondly, what drive is the computer booting from? Siegs07, why do you think they're backwards? If the setup is correct, and the computer is booting from the D: drive, I don't see the problem? What drive has Windows on it and Documents and Settings?

 

Is it possible that the C drive was the old boot drive, and when the new drive was installed, it wasn't partitioned and just was granted the D: letter during formatting and Windows installation?

 

The disk partition sticky you read recommends separating the drive into 2 partitions. I would go even further with drives over 120 mg. I would separate it into at least 4 partitions and larger drives into 5 or more. The reason is for a) defrag and antivirus/malware scanning and ease of sorting files.

Defragging and av/malware scanning is faster when you can set it up for smaller partitions and if you set up separate partitions for video, audio, graphic images, data, and backups, it's much easier to find your files. I would even set up a separate partition for ghost imaging, and another one in case you want to dual boot at some time in the future (Linux or DOS).

 

What you may want to do is get a program like Partition Magic and partition the rest of the free space on the D drive or extended partition (please clarify which one it is).

 

There are other factors to take into account. If the computer is manufactured by Dell, they install hidden partitions for their Dell tools, and you have to be careful not to erase it if the owner wants them. I personally always reformat any hard drive that has them. If the user can be tought how to back up his OS drive and programs using an imaging program like Acronis True Image or Norton Ghost, it's much better than the Dell system backups.

 

 

i said they were switched because my experience has usually been that the C drive was usually larger than the D drive. all of this program files and system files are in the C, so they're not switched in that respect, its just that the D is larger than i usually see and the C is smaller than usual. i just left all his programs and system files on the C and set up his iTunes and limewire to save their media on D. its fine now, thanks for helping