Hello all! I would greatly appreciate some help/advice on my Gateway ML6720 laptop. I did a Vista clean reinstall successfully and I left the hard drive partitioned as it came, with the C: drive with a capacity of ~10G and the D: drive with the remaining ~101G. I thought leaving the OS on the smaller partition would protect it?...I don't know. However, the default is to save everything to C: including zip files, etc. So even though I try to put everything I can on D: (by constantly switching the destination directory to D: from the default C:, I keep getting a "there is very little space on C:" message. How would people suggest I deal with this, hopefully without losing all of my data/files already on the computer? Thanks for any help!!!!!

one thing you can do is manipulating the default paths for user profiles from inside the registry. change it for example from "c:\users\username\my documents" to "d:\users\username\my documents" and so on... (I don't have a vista client here to tell you the exact path(s) but you should see it on your computer anyway)
this tales alot of time and you will need to do it with all paths you find in the registry.
second is to move free space to your c-partition. you could download the gparted live cd boot your lcomputer with it and resize. you will not lose your data doing that with gparted.

hope this helps you.... good luck

hey, thanks for the quick reply!!! Is there a way to just get rid of the partition and have one big hard drive? Is there any downside to this?

you can make the whole drive as one big partition with gparted.
well for laptops I prefer one system partition and one for the data.
thats a little more secure in case of a system crashing. but if your disk goes bad it was nothing...
that would be your decision

and, no need to quote the post before your post

thanks mscrx...what would you advise overall to do if you don't mind me asking? (i.e. size to resize to, any other changes to make to make this run as smoothly as possible...)

I would go the way I usually go and boot the gparted live cd and delete the second partition (you said there were no data on it). then I would resize the first partition where your windows is installed to a size that suites my needs (I think of applications that I may install later).
from what I read your disk is 110gb? I guess its a 120gb and you have like 116 real gb from gigabyte to megabyte conversion.
anyway I would resize my first partition to 40gb (would be 40960mb) and create a new partition from the unused disk space (would be something like 76gb). there you can store whatever you don't want to backup everytime you do a fresh install of windows (e.g. documents, music files, videos, game saves, whatever....)

is that what you wanted to hear?

hey, thanks again. Actually, the way it is now, I have all of my music, files on the second partition "d:", while the os is on the smaller c: that is running out of room. So it's not empty. How does that change things?...

ok, then you need to resize the second partition first. it depends on how many data you have on it. the data need to be moved from the cut off part to the free part of the resized partition. lets say you have 100gig d: with 30gig of data. you can resize d: to 60 gig without problems. you can read through the manuals for gparted but I think I remember it would be good to have twice as much space available as the size of the data. 30 > 60 in that case.
to be 100% on the save side you should backup the data on d: !!

edit:

I was in a hurry writing the above...
so step by step:

0. do a backup of the d: data if possible
1. resize the d: partition (current size minus size you want to add to the c: partition)
2. then resize the c: partition with the unused space you got from resizing the d: partition
3. apply the actions
4. reboot and enjoy

don't hesitate to ask if you have any questions!

this is very helpful...that program looks a little complicated to run, though, is it? I downloaded the iso file but haven't done anything else with it so far...

actually it is no big deal. burn the iso to a cd and boot it up. you will see it is like every other partitioning software (e.g partition magic) but it is free.
try it and you wont miss it!

well, I really need to do this since I don't even have enough room on c: to install vista updates...I've been trying to hold out until I can back up my stuff on d: on an external hard drive--do you think it's okay to go ahead and allocate another 10 gigs to c: without backing up all of my music, etc. that's on d:?