Vista Business x64, Space issues resulting from partitioned drive, file linking?

[Punkrulz]

Hey guys,

So I'm back to the problem where I was silly and thought that it would be better off to partition my drive so that one partition would be for the OS, and the rest for everything else. I went with the recommended partition + extra to accommodate for growing Windows files, but I've been quickly running out of space. I really do not want to have to reformat, so here are some questions that hopefully I can get to the right area.

1) Are there any free programs out there that will allow me to basically unpartition the drive? I know partition magic could somewhat do that, however I know it isn't free... I also don't know how many problems I would have for programs looking for D:\Program Files(x86) if I unpartitioned into C.

2) Since my Adobe Suite installed a lot of files onto my C drive (and they said there was no way around that), I'm looking for alternative means. One thing I found is something called Link folder, that typically uses aliases to make the program think they're in one location, but they could really be in another. A link to a program that did this is Link Folder

Has anyone used that program? Are there free ones like it out there, or if you have used it is it worth the $15?

Any other recommendations you guys may have?

 

[Punkrulz]

Does anyone have any additional information for this? I am on the verge of formatting my PC and that really is not something I want to have to do.

 

[American Zombie]

If you just want to reclaim the space you can do that in disk management of Vista.

You can delete the partition then resize the other partition to max size.

If you want a free partition tool try GParted.

 

[Punkrulz]

Zombie... you are in fact, the man. I never knew about Vista's shrink / expand capabilities. I'm finally responding to this now because I just got done doing what I had to do. Unfortunately, Vista has some serious issues w/ file copying. It makes sense that I wasn't able to shrink my 2nd partition and not be able to expand my 1st because the space was not in sequential order...

Shrunk partition 2 -> Created a 3rd partition -> Copied everything to the 3rd partition -> Delete partition 2 -> Expand 1st partition -> Shrink 3rd partition -> Create 2nd partition again -> Move everything back to that and reissue like drive letter.

The biggest problem (that I tried endlessly to find a resolution for) is the horrible copy speeds I was getting. I had to move 150+gb of data to another location on the same disk (7200rpm drive mind you) and the highest speed started out at maybe 36Mbps, then bottomed out around 18Mbps... This apparently is a huge issue, and even when copying using robocopy I wasn't able to speed things up.

Unfortunately, I read your post a bit too late. I wasn't about to use my girlfriends computer as network storage and copy everything there when I initially was going to reformat... so I dropped $65 on an external 250gb 7200rpm HD... I'm sure I'll use it in the future, but I need to convince myself right now that it was still a good buy regardless!

 

[LordOfLA]

moving files around on the same disk halves the data transfer rate, you were getting the fastest possible copy speeds during the operation.

 

[kcnychief]

I know it's after the fact but I can recommend using KillCopy for file transfers within Vista. It's gotten better with SP2, but KillCopy still trumps it IMO.

KillCopy

 

[Punkrulz]

Thanks KCNY, I'll give it a look.

My external hard drive came in today, and somehow I lucked out; I ordered the 250gb, and while they sent me the 250gb box the hard disk is 500gb. So I'm beginning to copy files to it, and again I'm running into the same slowness issues; I'm down to 8.5mb/s. I understand that if it's on the same disk it's half the transfer rate, but now going to a usb 2.0 disk?

 

[Punkrulz]

KCNY,

Thanks for recommending KillCopy. It seems to have sped up the transfer process from my local hard disk to my USB external hard disk a little bit. Instead of a steady transfer rate of 8-15MBps, it's about 23-26MBps... it's still tremendously slow. Why is Vista so horrible at this?