Partion Problems on hard drive

[whitedove]

I am using an emachine with 2 gigs of ram running Windows XP

I purchased a 500 gig Sea Gate Hard drive. I installed it on my computer and used the software that came with it to clone my old drive to the new one. The software that came with my e-machine wasn't so great and I still had problems. I decided to install another copy of xp that I had on the drive. The XP installation recognized the other partition and asked me what I wanted to do with it. It recomended I leave that partition alone and create a new one for the current installation. I thought everything was okay. When the computer boots up it asks me which partition I want to access and I chose the correct one. Everything was working better than ever until I noticed somethng unusual. The other partition which was only 15 gigs was named recovery C and the new partition was created as local disk E. Naturally programs are installed to the c drive and I was quickly using up the 15 gigs. I can't move the programs and drivers that were installed from the recovery c to the e drive as they might not work. I went into the registry and changed the file installation drive to the e drive but it still seems that some things are getting on that partition. Things like Temporary internet files, offline webpages, recycle bin, downloaded program files, etc. I got a warning message that drive space was low only 200 mb out of 15 gigs. I don't know what will happen when it gets full. I could try formatting the whole drive and starting over but I would lose some expensive programs that I would not be able to activate again. What is my best option for fixing this problem? Resizing the partitions? What is the best program to use for doing this?
Any advice is greatly appreciated
Whitedove

 

[CrazeD]

I'd recommend repartioning if you're able to save your data, however, you can change the environment variables to change the location which the temporary data is stored.

System properties > advanced > environment variables.

 

[whitedove]

In System properties environment variables I find this
c:\windows\temp when I highlight this and click edit
I get a box that says Temp
then in the next line it says %systemroot%\temp
What wouold I change this to?
Thanks

 

[KSoD]

You dont want to change that. That needs to stay as what it is labeled.

Sadly the only thing you can realy do is get the installers for the applications and reinstall them on the XP that has the drive space. What you are trying to do might not work in the long run.

 

[CrazeD]

Change it to the other drive.

For example;

E:\TEMP

It can be whatever you want. %systemroot% refers to C:\WINDOWS.

That should free up a little bit of space when doing things that write large amount of data to the temp folders.

Also, I forgot to mention that you can find quite a few free/trial programs to resize partitions. A good one is Partition magic. Actually, if you can find a copy of Hirens Boot CD, that has several partition tools (as well as lots more other tools).

 

[whitedove]

Thank you!