i’m running out of space in drive c: and i have plenty of space in other drives

i would like to move the entire drive c: as it is, to another free drive and to have all the system information i.e windows, program files etc move with it - without damaging the current setup in order to get the new drive to function as the main system drive.

thanks for any information

Toscanini,
For what you want to do, I use a software called Acronis True Image, it does exactly what you need and it does it well, it is also fairly easy to do…
Basically with this software you copy an image of your OS Drive C to any other either partition or USB external drive with sufficient space for either backup or relocation purposes. You can select to back up just your OS partition or an entire physical hard drive to another, as long as the destination drive has enough room for the image.
After you have your image safely backed up you will use a boot cd that you will be prompted to create with this software (prior to backing up drive) to boot from this cd and restore this backed up image to the destination of your choice.
You can also have it automatically back up your new content at increments as you add data to your drives, I don’t use this feature, I just like to have a physical back up image of my OS system safely outside of my PC , so I keep it in a USB drive I use just for that, I do a full back up like every month or so, or every time I feel is necessary, but like I said, you can automate “incremental backups” as well, you choice.
But essentially for relocating an entire C: drive this software would be perfect, check it out at link below…

http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/

Jose

BajaCapt thank you so much for this info and for your time

i have my c drive backed up with norton ghost, i checked out the link for Acronis and i thank you for that.

so eventually by using this software: http://www.partition-tool.com/personal.htm i merged c+d together since they both share the same disc, only before i did it; i copied the files from d to a different drive and named it d.
i’m glad it ended up without damaging anything, there is enough space in c now and i feel much more relaxed (-:

Thanks again my friend

Hi toscanini, I agree with BajaCapt I also use Acronis and it’s great software and easy to use.

Toscanini,
Glad you worked things out, and your welcome.
On a quick note on the subject, try on making it a rule when your C: drive reaches only 15 percent left of its capacity (or any other partition actually), consider it full, reason being is that in order to defragment your drive or specific partition you need at least 15 percent free space for your defrag app to work with the relocation of files, so always leaving at least 15 percent of unused space in any partition is always good practice ;)

Jose.

Jose, hate to disagree a bit there, but I suggest that the amount of free space on a system hard drive should be a lot higher than 15%.....probably closer to 25-35%, especially when one is trying to defrag that drive (via Diskeeper for example). I would never let a drive get down to 15%; experience has shown it can become extremely sluggish at that point.............frank

frankE - 09 April 2009 12:43 PM

Jose, hate to disagree a bit there, but I suggest that the amount of free space on a system hard drive should be a lot higher than 15%.....probably closer to 25-35%, especially when one is trying to defrag that drive (via Diskeeper for example). I would never let a drive get down to 15%; experience has shown it can become extremely sluggish at that point.............frank

Frank,
I agree that having more free space than 15 percent is better, but 15 percent is the minimum recommended, or course if you keep lets say 30 percent free gigs is better, but leaving the minimum required 15 percent will do the job fine, specially if you don’t let your specific partition get too defragmented, the only thing if your partition gets too defragmented is that it will take longer to defragment if you leave only 15 percent, but it will get done, and no, no sluggishness will be experienced once defragmented, if experiencing sluggishness in a properly defraged partition even with only 15% free space, then it would not be a bad idea to run a hard drive diagnostic app, all manufacturers offer free diagnostic utilities for this purpose.
I do use Diskeeper in all of our PCs, except the latest addition, a Dell 730X with Vista 64 ( a home network of 7 PCs total) and while most partitions have anywhere from 40 to 20 percent free space, a few have the minimum 15 percent, they all running perfect and with a feature of Diskeeper called “invisitask”, it basically defrags in the background during idle times, pretty cool feature.
In the case of my laptop I keep in my bedroom, right now the free capacity of my OS partition C: has only about 17 percent free in it and I keep my swap ( or paging) file in it, and it is purring along just fine, I do occasionally run a boot time defragmentation which also checks the MFT and paging files for fragments. However I need to buy a bigger drive for this aging laptop, a dell XPS M170 which still uses ATA type drives ( kind of a bummer, would prefer SATA)
Bottom line, the 15 percent figure is just a minimum advised but if you can afford more, then by all means is better…

Jose.