My Hard Drive

[tw]

Originally Posted by TheMercenary

Is almost full in my laptop? It is a Dell Inspiron 8600 with an 80 gig HD, tons of memory, and I only have about 5% free space. ... I have an external HD of 100gig but my experience in the past has been that I was unable to move actual programs to the external drive because they need the C drive to run.

As others noted, and to better summarize it. You have two types of files. Those that execute the OS and programs. And those that are data. Data will clearly be the largest consumer of disk. If you programs are working properly, then all that data will be in subdirectories of "My Documents".

Two ways to move or duplicate (safety backup) that data. First is to load an OS on a second drive (see below for also creating contents of a 1st partition), then create the same user account, then move the drive to the laptop, and finally use the old OS to copy everything in the old My Documents to a new My Documents on that second drive. Now you have a backup of data and potentially a drive that only need be fixed to boot in the Dell and then reloaded with those programs.

Second is to network this laptop to another computer and transfer all that data to the other networked computer drive.

Once you have this data safely stored elsewhere, then buy a larger drive for the Dell, reload the OS on that new drive, and then reload all programs. Programs cannot be copied for a large number of reasons including unique program configuration data is stored in the registry. Registry cannot be copied from any one system to another (without significant technical knowledge).

A third alternative is to use some disk copy program such as Ghost to copy everything from that 80 Gig drive to a larger new drive (that will also fit in a laptop). This is a most preferred option because Dells have something you definitely want to preserve - the 1st partition contains comprehensive hardware diagnostics that you definitively want on the new C: drive when installed in the Inspiron. Of course, this option has a complication. Get a special cable so that the laptop drive can temporarily be used as a slave drive in another system that will make the actual disk image copy. I don't know if Ghost can copy to an externally attached drive. Maybe it can.

This third option, if you can work it out, will result in a best (ideal) solution.