Can I combine hard drives?

[chakka35]

MY hard drive (120MB) is almost full, though I can't think why. Two questions:

1.How can I see the full content of my hard drive so as to see what I can clear out? The list of programs in the ADD/REMOVE facility add up to very little.

2.I have an external hard drive. Can I use it as an automatic overflow from my main hard drive? If so, how do I do it?

All help appreciated.

[factor-fiction]

For 1, there are several ways. You could right click on the Windows icon and select explore; then right click on the relevant bits- eg C drive- and then you can explore again or sort by size.
Have you done a windows clean-up and deleted all unused stuff such as Recycle bin/ Major items that take up space are videos, music, photos and sometimes old restore points

[chakka35]

Thanks, factor30. Will try all that for No.1

[pdq1]

Another old fashioned method is to use MSdos.

Look through your files for command promptie C:\ It comes with every system usually
Click on it.
You will then see the DOS command Line.

Type dir/s/p

This will list all the directories on the disk with the amount of disk space for each

the /p command stops after every page displayed. On the hard drive c: there are literally thousands of files so you need to be patient to see them all

[chakka35]

Thank you all for being so helpful. A curious thing:

I have a lot of undeleted e-mails in my INBOX and SENT folders, many of them with bulky attachments. I decided to have a thorough purge of them. But when I delete a load of emails the contents of my hard disk go up not down! Can anyone explain that.

[chakka35]

Sorry, methyl, for not answering your question. It is newish with a 120Gb hard drive.

[chakka35]

Sorry to be so uniformative, methyl. I use Windows XP on a HP Pavilion Home PC. Firefox for internet access and Outlook Express for emails.
I have received no error message re my hard drive; I discovered the excessive content by looking at Proprties of the drive in My Computer.

This morning I deleted all photographs (and the Recycle Bin, of course) and gained a mere 3Gb, reducing my disk content from 114 Gb to 111.

My daughter, newly arrived from USA, has done the various things suggested above and has discovered that Windows is taking up 78Gb which she thinks is wildly excessive. But when we look at the contents of Windows we have no idea which of the items we can delete without ruining everything.

That's all for now. Thanks again.

[HowardKennitby]

78GB for Windows is huge.
I run XP Home + sp3 and with MS Office, Norton AV, Antimalware and all my other applications it only comes to 15GB.
Are you sure the 78GB is just for Windows?

[chakka35]

Yes, Howard. The Windows folder content shows 78Gb. Also, my daughter has downloaded an app which maps my hard drive and it confirms that 78Gb is used up by Windows. There is one large chunk of 22.1Gb called Temp and another of 21.0Gb called Installer. There are others called MS.NET, Framework, v3.5, Logs, System 32, config, which have sizes ranging from 9.6Gb to 17.6Gb, but I can't make any combination add up to 78 Gb. I'll press on. Thanks to all.

[Davethedog]

You have defragmented the hard drive I take it?

[squarebear]

I can only assume that you have been storing things in the windows folder. There is no way it would anywhere close to 78Gb on it's own.

[daffy654]

You can safely delete everything within the TEMP folder but don't delete the folder itself, also empty your PREFETCH folder.

[daffy654]

Download CCleaner and run it, it will clear a lot of these folders with the default settings.
http://www.piriform.com/CCLEANER

[chakka35]

DAVE - yes, I have defragged. SQUAREBEAR - can't imagine how I would store things in Windows, but you may be right.
DAFFY - It won't let me clear the Temp folder because of a bit of it that is needed. I'll have to look for PREFETCH; no idea where it is. The free version of CCleaner is not available, so I'll wait awhile before investing $25 in the commercial one.