I need to clean up a hard drive? w/out erasing everything?

Question

I just moved into a new place and my roommate as a computer and i was trying to clean up some space because he has 0 space left on it. I went through to add/delete programs and nothing changes. How do i create more space on the drive.

Answer 1

you should have an option on your puter - start - accessories - system tools - disc clean up! click on that and you will see what it is dumping. it is usually your temporary internet files and worthless stuff like that.

Answer 2

Do a disk cleanup and defrag..

Start >all programs > accessories > system tools > disk cleanup

After your put a check mark by everything and run the cleanup, follow the same steps as above to run the defrag.

NOTE: The cleanup and defrag could take several hours depending on the size of the hard drive and how long it's been since they were last done.

Answer 3

Compressing the drive will severely impact your performance. Don't do it.

Disk Cleanup is your most immediate option.
Open up "My computer", right click on the full disk and select properties. There is button under the "General" tab called Disk Cleanup.
It takes a while but will get you some space back.

Once you have some elbow room, I recommend Ccleaner. It's free and it's much faster than Disk Cleanup.

Answer 4

Well first and most obvious is empty the recycle bin.. Yeah, I know you already did that.. so...

Now you really are in a bind, you have to delete things without damaging anything.

First of all..

Using the windows search feature, look for very large files..

Are there any over 500 MB in size? Most of them are safe to delete surprisingly. Just note the path and make sure your not deleting a game you like. Also don't try to delete a file called pagefile.sys you wont be able too.

But honestly I would buy a bigger hard drive and use partition magic or Norton ghost to mirror it over to the new one.

whats a 240 gig drive these days anyhow? 100$?

Answer 5

if you have norton system works they have an option to help u do that..under utilities they show u how much disk space to use have etc and they sweep crap out ..I suggest move music to media D section instead of C drive.. C drive is good for prgrams divide ur c drive into 3 --defrag and make backups of hard drive things an remove if u dont need that in there such as many music cds files etc there is also an option dto remove unused programs in norton system works as well

Answer 6

It sounds like you are just out of room. A good back up program will allow you to back up and then remove programs not often used. You can also expand your storage capacity with an inexpensive external hard drive.

Answer 7

http://www.ccleaner.com/
go here and download ccleaner. It's a free registry cleaner. I've been using it for a ling time with nothing but success. the first time I ran the program it found almost 20 GB of junk. I had already done many of the steps mentioned in this thread and they just didn't help.

Answer 8

The first thing I would do is go to the cmd prompt and type in del *.tmp /s
this should delete any temp files. Next I would in the same command window del *.zip /s this will delete all the zip files he has downloaded. Next open IE and delete his browser cache. Next I would look for music (wav & mp3) and burn them to a cd. Finally look for move (mpg) and image (iso) files

Answer 9

Use Disk Cleanup

start-all programs-accessories-system tools-disk cleanup

Answer 10

Why dont you save everything you want to keep on a back-up disk. Then erase everything else and install only what you want back. You can do this in just a few hours.

Answer 11

If the disk is pack then delete unwanted data, or if you are having another partation then move some data to another partation. and if there is no partation then take your data of different storage then format your drive and create partations.
there is no software by which you can increase size of Hard disk.