Windows partition question

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mdav056

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#281107 30-Jan-2021 09:22

My main drive which contains both my system disk C: and a data drive D: has an annoying unlettered partition *: of 455 mb sitting between C: and D:, and this is labelled just Primary.

It contains similar (but fewer) files as the System Reserved partition, but the dates in the unlettered partition are 2015/2016, much older than the System Reserved files (up to 2020).

It is annoying when I need to change the sizes of C: and D: partitions.

Question is: Can I delete this partition and make the C: and D: drives adjacent?

Thanks

gml

xpd

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#2644336 30-Jan-2021 10:10

If its System Reserved, don't touch it.

How often are you resizing your partitions for it to be viewable ???

XPD / Gavin

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mdav056

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#2644397 30-Jan-2021 12:39

Yes, I know.

Resize about 2x/year. Yesterday, and when I replaced the drive just before christmas. EasUS partition master 15.

Don't understand the implications of the viewable question -- answer is, when I replaced the drive, and recently many times as the C: drive got overfull, yesterday about 10x as I repartitioned it.

gml

xpd

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#2644408 30-Jan-2021 13:27

99.9% of users don't view their HDD partitions that often thats all :) Where it sits in the partitions shouldn't matter either.

Honestly, don't worry about it, its usually only around 500MB. If your C drive is getting full all the time, you need to look at how you're storing your data and the size of the drive you're using.

My C drive (120GB SSD) consists of the OS and core program such as Office etc - anything else gets installed to a secondary physical drive (480GB SSD) as D. I do have a server though that contains all my media/docs etc, so I can get away with minimal space on the desktop PC.

XPD / Gavin

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mdav056

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#2644437 30-Jan-2021 16:25

OK, thanks. All my data are stored on D:, and there is a lot of this, but I have a lot of applications for work purposes (blame COVID) that I have needed to install on C:.

The crunch is probably OneDrive, where I like to backup my D: data, and to do this I robocopy it to C:\onedrive for automatic synch. Which means that C: also contains a copy of d:... I have tried to do this in other ways (like give OneDrive the d: drive letter -- because I have legacy one-off programs to analyze data, going back years -- talking thousands here -- that look for data from the current d: drive). I do have 2 or 3 other backups too on removeable disks), and I had to do major sortouts on my laptops etc. Gave up. So C: just gets more full with more data collection to d:.

I don't know what would happen if I made the onedrive folders residing on c: on demand only, and backed up directly to the onedrive cloud?

I just wish that OneDrive wasn't free with Office 365, so that I could justify a terabyte of cloud storage elsewhere to which I could back up in a more sensible way. I find OneDrive difficult and annoying to use.

As you can probably see, I have a legacy system that goes back to the start of PCs when I thought I had a good and usable data system (twin floppies!), and have just been updating windows ever since. Old dog.

Suggestions welcome, apart from spending lots of money or retirement.

gml

rhy7s

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#2644439 30-Jan-2021 16:33

Would junction links work for you to manage your OneDrive storage space? e.g. https://simpleitpro.com/index.php/2020/07/24/how-to-onedrive-folder-sync-any-directory-on-your-pc-via-mklink/

mdav056

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#2644482 30-Jan-2021 21:31

rhy7s: Would junction links work for you to manage your OneDrive storage space? e.g. https://simpleitpro.com/index.php/2020/07/24/how-to-onedrive-folder-sync-any-directory-on-your-pc-via-mklink/

Thanks, @rhy7s, That looks interesting, but I don't think it would work for me -- I often want to use some file I've just produced immediately in further analyses (part of a batch file sometimes), and I wondered what the network latency to OneDrive might do to this. Though, maybe, if I always save files to the D: drive and call files from the D: drive in the next program, this would not be a problem.

I also wasn't clear if all sub directories would be synched from a single parent directory -- I'll have to look at the info on this command and find out.

gml