How to Swap Windows from a HD that's Running Out of Space to One that has a lot of space?

warder808 · March 2016

Hi,

My C drive has all of windows installed. It is running out of space, my D drive has tons of space. I'm not the most tech savvy person, but I can follow directions well.

Can I copy or move Windows over to the larger drive? If so, how easy/difficult is it?

tsmvengy · March 2016

Why not just move some stuff that is NOT Windows (like documents/music/media) to your D drive?

warder808 · March 2016

Great Question!

I don't have pics or videos on this drive.

I can't see which files are taking up all the space. Lots of the folders I look at don't show anything in there. I'm assuming it's lots of Windows files. I've had this PC for 5 or 6 years.

Gaslight · March 2016

warder808 wrote: »

Great Question!

I don't have pics or videos on this drive.

I can't see which files are taking up all the space. Lots of the folders I look at don't show anything in there. I'm assuming it's lots of Windows files. I've had this PC for 5 or 6 years.

Have you run the Disk Cleanup utility?

warder808 · March 2016

I have run CC Cleaner. It may get me a gig of space or so. I'll wait till I get home and put up some more detailed info.

Elvenshae · March 2016

@warder808

You might consider using WinDirStat - it'll tell you exactly what is taking up all the space on a particular drive.

LD50 · March 2016

Also, run the actual windows disk cleanup utility. Type in 'disk cleanup' into start, and run it as administrator. Removing previous versions of windows and old update files can free up upwards of 50 gigs if you've done enough updates.

If you're using steam or origin for games, it's possible to set up steam and origin directories on your d drive without needing to move your actual steam/origin install. Moving your games to the other disk can free up lots of space.

As to moving the windows install itself: while it's possible to move the install, doing so requires knowledge and use of advanced non-windows disk and boot utilities. It would be easier to simply install a fresh copy of windows onto the new drive if you really want to move the install over.

warder808 · April 2016

LD50 wrote: »

Also, run the actual windows disk cleanup utility. Type in 'disk cleanup' into start, and run it as administrator. Removing previous versions of windows and old update files can free up upwards of 50 gigs if you've done enough updates.

How do you do this? The largest files I can find are in winsxs folder. I'm using Windows 7. I saw a video online that suggested using the Disk Cleanup utility to clean up old versions of windows. Unfortunately when I go to this utility, I do not see the option that they say to use.

LD50 · April 2016

Go to Control Panel -> Administrative Tools. Right click Disk Cleanup and select "Run as administrator". Select your C drive. It should give you a list of checkbox items, go through the list and check everything that's taking up a decent amount of space. The Disk Cleanup utility won't remove anything important. You could check every box if you wanted to, but the smaller items aren't really worth the time, and some things (like the thumbnail cache) are just going to fill back up as they're recreated.

wunderbar · April 2016

for the record: the option to remove "previous versions of windows" is a Windows 10 feature.

Djeet · April 2016

I wouldn't directly mess with winsxs directory unless you know what you're doing; it contains many files important to Windows operation, and you could F stuff up royally. It does store stuff related to windows update that you can remove so long as you are fine with not being able to roll back updates. You should be able to remove that using Disk Cleanup though.

In the case where that doesn't help you I'd rec imaging the existed C: drive to another drive. Maybe

? If this is your solution then we'd need to know more about your setup. Like, is this one physical drive with multiple partitions, or are C: and

2 separate physical hard drives?

Tofystedeth · April 2016

If I remember correctly the size of winsxs can get misreported by some tools because of symlinks or something, so it may not even be as big as it appears.

Aioua · April 2016

if you open an admin cmd line you can try:

dism /online /cleanup-image /spsuperseded

this will make it so you cannot roll back some updates

basically that's what a lot of winsxs ends up being, bit and bobs you'd need to restore your machine to a previous state

the dism cleanups work better in 8+ so you might not save much space, regardless.

Penny Arcade

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