Ways to clean up winxp boot drive?

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CleanSlate

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I recently formated my computer into a 2.5 gig boot drive + 25 gig storage drive. This configuration works great, however I am running out of room on my 2.5 gig C: drive and disk clean up doesn't help much at all. Now, seeing as I don't save anything to this drive, I don't even know what is being saved onto it. Thus I don't know how to clean it up manually. Every few weeks I get maybe a 20 meg slice taken out of the 300 megs that's left... Advice would be appreciated.

~Adam
 
Originally posted by CleanSlate
I recently formated my computer into a 2.5 gig boot drive + 25 gig storage drive. This configuration works great, however I am running out of room on my 2.5 gig C: drive and disk clean up doesn't help much at all. Now, seeing as I don't save anything to this drive, I don't even know what is being saved onto it. Thus I don't know how to clean it up manually. Every few weeks I get maybe a 20 meg slice taken out of the 300 megs that's left... Advice would be appreciated.

~Adam
Click to expand...


First of all, are you installing your programs to your storage drive?
if you are, then there is no way your boot drive to be filled with so much data as to cover 2.5 megs. (XP occupies 1.5 more or less)

Now if you are installing your programs to the boot drive, then it is way to small...

The second option actually works best for almost all configurations... I recommend that you reformat, reinstall and at lest give 6 gigs to your boot and program drive and the rest for storage...



PS: Maybe your internet history is filling your boot drive too... Try cleaning it from your browsers options...
 
No I dont install any programs to my boot drive..

I cleaned up the ie stuff, used a program to delete all the .dat hidden files.. and that got me up to 306 megs free from 280.. but now I don't know what to do.

Edit: PMG there is a 500 meg file called hiberfil.sys in my C:/ directory.. wtf is this?

Edit2: google shows that this file is the hybernation file, if you disable hibernation and then reboot it will be deleted. Some ppl have said it's grown to gigs in size o_O


~Adam
 
gg 800 megs free... me > free space.

Really good windows xp cleanup tools: http://www.x9000.net/

I found those tools to be very very usefull and so many options to clean things up and tweak windows.. Really amazing.


~Adam
 
hiberfil.sys is the file where all your RAM is stored when you hibernate. If you don't use hibernate, disable it and delete the file (if it's still there).

BTW, this is one of several reasons I not longer break up my system and programs. If you really want to partition, make a much larger system volume and only store documents/mp3/videos on the other partition.

You could also resize the partition with partition magic or some other partitioning tool.
 
I already did that.. (edit2)

Yes, I'd do it but I don't feel the need now that I dont ahve so little space.. for a boot drive 800 megs free is perfect. 35% of the drive for God's sakes lol.

~Adam
 
Originally posted by Phoenix86

BTW, this is one of several reasons I not longer break up my system and programs. If you really want to partition, make a much larger system volume and only store documents/mp3/videos on the other partition.
Click to expand...



I agree.

People forget that when they install programs the majority of them have various components that get copied into the Windows directory and the Documents and Settings directory tree. This will fill your drive up fast....
 
Hey, also... Set your pagefile for drive D and turn it off completely on C. Turn off the recycle bin on drive C as well and set it so it uses D. Then reboot. If you haven't done this already, then you will be very pleased with the amount of space that you recover by doing these two things.
 
What OS are you running? XP you jsut right click on the recycle bin and goto properties and it's right there. I don't think any other OS can do that, at least not a windows OS.

~Adam
 
OK So if I have 4 partitions, a boot one, one with the pagefile and all the temp files, a data partition which had my documents on it and all my programmes and then an audio partition that I keep all my music on. If I turn off the recycle bin on all my drives apart from the pagefile/temp one then will everything deleted from my other partitions go to there?
 
Originally posted by Keith130
OK So if I have 4 partitions, a boot one, one with the pagefile and all the temp files, a data partition which had my documents on it and all my programmes and then an audio partition that I keep all my music on. If I turn off the recycle bin on all my drives apart from the pagefile/temp one then will everything deleted from my other partitions go to there?
Click to expand...

Not really sure about it, but i guess it would like to what happens when you delete something from an usb flash drive. Everything goes to the active recycle bin
 
That's the point, when it's deleted it can't go anywhere but to that drive..

~Adam
 
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