Need Computer Assistance

[Zhinrak]

Hey guys, ive only just recently joined THN properly but i do only really play WoW.

eitherway i was hoping that a few people on here would know something about computers and be able to help me.

my comp should have about 400gb of space, and this space is divided over the C and D drive. the retards at PC world where i bought this thing [i know, bad idea going to PC world ] have allocated the C drive, which has program files and respectively should need more space, with only 40gb of space, and the D drive, with my documents in it has been allocated about 350gb.

This hasnt been much of a problem but its becoming very irritating that i have to install my games elsewhere leading me to having game files all over the place. does anyone know how i can change this? or am i going to just have to set my default drive to D?

 

[Wol]

afaik, youll be hard pushed to try and tweak it into anything nice if youve already got everything installed.

You can get software to merge the 2 partitions, however i dont know what thisll do in terms of stuff trying to access D:/ and finding nothing. Never risked this before on my system, as i only have one computer and would be royally ... screwed if it went wrong!

Dependent on the state of your system , and how much stuff you have all over the place, it might be worthwhile just wiping and reinstalling the OS and games all under one partition. However, this does depend on how much stuff you have.

I did this with steam, as i have C: (laptop) E: (40gb old HDD image / backup) F: (210gb data ( /porn ) drive). I had to munge around all the game files a lot to get it from C to F, but it seems to be okay now. Trouble is i can only do steam things if i have my external hard drive(which i dont always have with me!)

Is there any massive problem with having the game files all over the place? You generally dont have to get at the files, as the actual game sorts that out.

 

[Ronin Storm]

Back in the days of flaky Win2K, I used to have 3 partitions. On a 120GB drive, I went for:

C: System 10GB
D: Applications 90GB
E: Documents 20GB

I'd install all my games to D:\Program Files\<whatever> and that worked just fine for almost everything.

These days, however, I'm just running a flat, single partition (on WinXP Pro).

However, there's nothing wrong with installing your games to your D: (or whatever) partition. Just come up with a common naming/pathing convention and go from there. I always installed all my games to D:\Program Files\Games\<game name>\ so that I collected them together, away from everything else. I hate the default convention of $Program Files$\<company name>\<product name>\ as why on earth would I want to search by company?!

 

[DeZmond]

Partition Magic or System Commander should be able to merge partitions. Alternatively, if you're short of cash but are technically competent enough, you could download Knoppix and burn it onto a CD, and then use the built in partition editor to change partitions at will.
To be perfectly honest though, it's not really worth the hassle - as has been said before, you should be fine with installing programs onto D:\.

 

[Tetsuo_Shima]

I have the same kind of setup, except that instead of partitioning one HDD into two, I've got 2 seperate HDDs - a 40Gb one with Windows and a couple other programs and also a 120Gb one with most of my games and music and all that. It's a fine setup functionally, but there are 2 irritating problems :-

1. Whenever I try to install anything it always comes up the default C:\Program Files\ Command and Conquer RA2 directory and I have to manually change it to F:\ (F because C is 40gb HDD, D is DVDROM and E is DVDRW) and create all the new folders myself which is a bit of a pain.

2. Some patches and updates will only try to find the game on the C:\ drive by default. So, even if the game is installed on the F:\ drive, if the patcher can't find it on the C:\ drive then it refuses to install.

If you can put up with that then you'll be OK, but I'd recommend just having one 400gb partition if its an easy option to take.

 

[Iron_fist]

i would highly recommend sticking with just installing programmes on the D:\ partition. I can assure you from a lot of personal experience that more often than not changing the partitions on disk which already has data on it is a recipe for lost files. if you are lucky enough to have the 40GB partition at the end of the hard disk then there should be little problem extending it as long as you have quite a few GB of free space at the end of the larger one otherwise it isn't unknown for an extension or merging to just overwrite files around the points where they join. whatever you do just make sure if you are changing the partitions you have a backup as it's better to be safe than sorry

 

[Ubiquitous]

If you have the Windows install media and can back up your important data to DVD or CD then I'd recomend the wipe option. At least then you'll have propper control over what the outcome will be. Once in the windows installer (for XP or Vista) my favoured approach is to delete all of the partitions and recreate them from scratch.

I'd recomened sticking with some kind of partition. It's an absolute lifesaver, when your windows installation gives up the ghost, to have all of your photos and stuff safely tucked away on another partition so that you can just format the system partition and start from scratch.

 

[Zhinrak]

Well by the sounds of it im better off just saving things to my D drive. sorting this problem out sounds like more hassle than its worth, just have to remember to change the directories. thanks for the info anyway