Restrictive hard-drive partitioning on Lenovo laptop

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Cicero

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I have a family friend who has a Lenovo laptop (maybe 2years old). It has a 250gig HD, which has been factory partitioned to a primary C drive of 20gigs, and secondary D drive of 230Gigs.

Now, this is becoming SO restrictive for them as nowadays its really difficult to keep under a measly 20gigs. Some dudes download that in a day! Its an absolute nightmare for him as he's down to 5MB left on the C drive, and can't even scan documents to his drive anymore. He has done a few cleanouts every now and then, but it keeps filling up as it would for anyone. I mean FFS, 20gigs!? :confused:

Is there a way to redo this partition easily? What are my options to help him?
 
Move My Documents to the d:drive (rclick, properties, move).
Clear out %temp% and c:\windows\temp

Uninstall some programs and try get the c:drive to have about 15% or more empty space

Back up the whole thing

Follow ghoti's link.
 
20GB for Windows XP/Ubuntu is more than enough.

If he's not using hibernation, then disable hibernation. I would recommend moving the My Documents folder to the D partition.
I would also recommend moving the swap file to the D partition.

You can download Parted Magic ISO and burn it to a CD, boot from the CD and then resize your partitions without losing any data. Please just take note that resizing partitions with data WILL BE a lengthy process that can take like 20 hours, depending on how full the partitions are.
 
Pada said:
20GB for Windows XP/Ubuntu is more than enough.
If he's not using hibernation, then disable hibernation. I would recommend moving the My Documents folder to the D partition.
I would also recommend moving the swap file to the D partition.

You can download Parted Magic ISO and burn it to a CD, boot from the CD and then resize your partitions without losing any data. Please just take note that resizing partitions with data WILL BE a lengthy process that can take like 20 hours, depending on how full the partitions are.
Click to expand...

Well, it just isn't for him. Maybe for pure windows or something (which is what you mean I'm sure), but not for other installed programs. He's not the most clued up dude so he doesn't want to bugger around with installations making them change from the default installation directory. The problem with this whole setup, is that the laptop user has to always be aware and weary of whats going onto his drive, and always try to install to the D drive. What a mission.

Otherwise, thanks for everyones input. I'll give those suggestions a try.

So Parted Magic will do it seemlessly? That does seem like the winner, even though it will take a while.

It has like a 'restore' button on the PC too (right under the power button), which will reinstall to factory settings if something goes wrong. Will redoing the partitions possibly bugger that up?
 
Easeus Partition Manager might be easier to use, but I've never been let down by Parted Magic.
 
Cool, i'll give it a go and get back to you guys.

Shot for the help!
 
I tried partition magic about 8 years ago - only magic it could do was make my data disappear :D
 
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