C drives and D drives

I'm not sure if this is the right place, but I'm doing this for gaming so it technically counts.

My C:drive is 4GBs from maximum capacity of 74.5GBs. However, my D:drive is empty and has room for 208GBs worth of stuff. Can I put stuff in the D:drive or is it reserved for something?

"Evii is right though" -Saturn "I didn't know you were a bitch Evii." -Lior Val

The C partition is usually reserved for the OS, system files and programs; while D is used for other data. There is no reason why you wouldn't use it.

edited 26th Jun '11 4:25:41 AM by MilosStefanovic

The sin of silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.

Keep your worthy content on D: and program files and downloads and whatnot on C: so that you can just format C: if needed

   I will consume not only your flesh, but your very soul.   

As above.

The D drive is just another place for storing data. It makes no difference whether something is on the D drive or the C drive... as long as it's not something stupid, like storing half of something on one drive and half of the other.

Swordsman Troper — Reclaiming The Blade — Watch

Alright, thanks you guys. I was wondering why it seemed like I had no space on my computer...

"Evii is right though" -Saturn "I didn't know you were a bitch Evii." -Lior Val

If you were storing your stuff on C: (an assumption I'm basing on the fact that no Windows installation can possibly take up 70 GBs, unless you have a faulty updater like I did on XP... and even then), move most of it to D:. It's better to leave as much free space on the system partition as possible.

Let me first say something, C and D drive...means nothing on its own. You probably don't even have separate drives, but rather two different partitions on the one actual drive*

. Partitions are basically just ways to create separate segments on one actual physical disk, which means if there's some software failure hopefully it won't spill over on everything. There's also some other technical issues like using different file system types for performance and disk checking, which usually prefers a disk to be unmounted, and that's kind of hard to do when your OS has all its open files on a given partition.

So whoever set up your computer, either you have an SSD device as I mentioned above, or they just decided to partition you a smaller OS partition and a larger data one. Some of mine have had a large main partition, and a small recovery partition, a few of which are mounted as the D: drive.

Does it matter where you put a given program? Not if the program was written properly, but a few may be rather silly, and expect you to have them in a particular location on the C: drive. This has become less common as time goes by, but it could still crop up. For your current programs, there are utilities that that can try to migrate them, or you can uninstall and reinstall if you prefer that.

There's the long explanation, hope it didn't confuse you any.

Well, my computers have two different drives, each with plenty of space, but they're usually SATA, so...

"Hipsters: the most dangerous gang in the US." - Pacific Mackerel

Storing programs away from your boot partition is often troublesome on Windows (though really, classic Mac OS is the only one where this isn't a problem, even OS X and Linux software is often riddled with bugs of this sort) because of badly written software that conflicts with such practices, so the advantages of storing your OS, software, and documents on separate volumes might be more trouble than it's worth for you.

If you think it's simply annoying, I'd recommend combining your partitions together. The easiest way to do this is with a specialty HDD utility like Partition Master (Windows 7's included utilities might be able to do this too,) another method (if you have another drive that's big enough handy) is to back up the contents of both partitions onto another drive, reformat it as one partition, and copy everything back.

I myself have three internal HDDs, which have come in handy for recovery work on numerous occasions.

Eric,

edited 26th Jun '11 8:24:41 PM by EricDVH

So the D drive can be used to install games and whatnot, right?

Would it be better to install them there or on the C drive?

Sonic hates SOPA

It depends on the game. You could do it with something like World Of Warcraft quite easily since it doesn't need any registry stuff to run properly AFAIK.

Fight smart, not fair.

Registery stuff?

Any examples of kinds of games that would be needed to put on the C drive?

Then again, if an MMO would work fine or even better on the D drive, I guess I shouldn't need to worry.

Sonic hates SOPA

A number of games I've had need to run the installer to function instead of just having the files present. World Of Warcraft is of the later variety.

Fight smart, not fair.

The install isn't the same as the patcher, I assume. Or else World Of Warcraft would need to be put in the C drive.

Hmm, and more space in C means overall performance goes up?

I think I have files to move around and things to reinstall.

Sonic hates SOPA

Well, you can put World Of Warcraft in a drive and run it from where ever. I had a friend who kept his copy on an external drive that he could carry around and run on various computers even if they were public ones.

Fight smart, not fair.

Huh, so I don't need to reinstall then, just move the files?

... I just realized how little I know of computers. I am an embarrasment to my geek brethen.

Sonic hates SOPA

If it's World Of Warcraft, you can just copy all the program files around to whatever drive you want and run it. Most of the issue with installing games to run them seems to be based on DRM. Since World Of Warcraft is an online only game, they don't care what you do with their data. I actually had the data on my machine before I started playing way back when. Do keep in mind, World Of Warcraft is like 20 gigs now.

Fight smart, not fair.

Oh, it's not World Of Warcraft, but it's an online only game and runs a patcher before loading the game.

However, if I have to I can just install it on my D drive.

Now I wonder, since the Users folder is on the C drive, can that be moved as well, with the password protection? (I share my PC often)

Sonic hates SOPA

If it's online where you have to log in, you can probably put all the files on a D drive and run it from there. Updaters are usually self contained .exe files in my experience.

You won't be able to access the Users folder if it's password protected and you're not the administrator account.

Fight smart, not fair.

Without knowing the specific game you're talking about, it is impossible to say whether it can be moved as easily as World of Warcraft, if you want to ask in the game's tech support forums, you could.

Moving your User directory can also be done, but it can be time-consuming and the specifics depend on what OS you have and what tools you have available. Is it worth doing? I can't say that without knowing more of your situation, but it is not for the faint of heart.

Really, moving things off the C: drive is not a miracle cure, as I said, you may just have a small recovery partition mounted as D: instead. You'll want to check and see how your system drives are configured.

edited 27th Jun '11 9:56:24 AM by blueharp

You can also fool some poorly written software through the use of shortcuts, aliases, and symlinks, which allows you to move your programs and users directories.

Eric,