How do I make it so when one hard drive is full, it spills over to my second hard drive? Vista.?

Question

Ok. I have 2x70g hard drives in my acer laptop. My primary (C:) drive is now full. So vista keeps telling me that there is no free space on my drive when there is a completely empty 70g hard drive (D:) right next door. So how do I get it to spill over?

Answer 1

Under Windows you can not. It only puts anything on the second drive if you tell it to. Best option on Vista is to back up anything you have on D:, then go to disk manager and delete the partition for it. You can then grow the system partition into this space.

Answer 2

You can change to a dynamic volume and then extend that volume onto the second disk (called a 'spanned volume'). This has some pretty serious consequences -- if either disk fails, your system is completely hosed.



I would not recommend doing this.



Buy a new drive, use a free tool to migrate your primary over to that drive, and use the new, larger drive.



If you must use both drives, I would do the following:



1) Uninstall a couple of large applications.



2) Reinstall them onto the other drive. If you use 'expert' mode, most applications will let you choose where to install them.



Edit: Ariyle55 is wrong. Vista editions either support dynamic drives for all partitions or none. There is no version of Vista that supports dynamic drives at all that won't let you extend your system partition. His answer would be correct for XP, which this isn't.



Oh, and in case he reads this: 1) You should check your facts before you tell someone else that they are wrong. 2) You should enable emails so that people can warn you when you are spreading misinformation.

Answer 3

Your drives are independent of each other.

You can not "spill" the contents of one,on to the other.

However,you could open up explorer,and move some files from one drive to the other.

Also,you could "burn" some files to a DVD,or CD,and then delete those files from your hard drive,freeing up valuable space.

Its up to you.

Clean up your drives,delete some programs,and files,or boot to the other drive,with more free space.

You should have your Operating system on both drives,to enable you to use them both as the BOOT drive.

Just change boot options in the BIOS.