Not enough Space on my Hard drive

Hello,
Well, this is my first time on a forum, so i'm kinda not knowing what to do... but i had a little delema...
A while back i had partitioned my hard drive into a C and a D drive. The C drive only has 2 Gb and the D drive has about 17 GB. (a total of 19 GB for the total hard drive). Now, i want to update and have Windows XP... but i tried and it said that i couldn't because Windows XP required about 1.5 Gb of storage space... Space i didn't have... for currently i only have about 456 Mb on the C drive and some 4.87 Gb on my D drive...
Is there a way where i can move more space from the D drive on to the C drive? Or should i reformat the C drive and install the XP on to the C drive and leave the D drive...??
Or should i get a 80 Gb hard drive and install XP on there... but how would i recover my old files on my 19 Gb hard drive?

(Also, my computer is 4 years old so i don't think it can handle 2 hard drives... unsure though...)

-dukeofhmong

I used to partition hard drives like you did. I ran into the same problem as you. Now, I just use one big partition. It's easier that way. At least for me, it is. A 4 year old PC should be able to handle 4 IDE devices. Even if it can't you can still buy a new hard drive. Uninstall the current drive. Install the new drive, patition and format it. Install your new O/S. Then you should be able to install your old hard drive and then you'll have C: as your new drive. D: as the old boot partition and E: as the old storage partition and F: as your CD-ROM. If for some reason you can only have two IDE devices on your system, then after you get the new drive up and working, you can remove the CD-ROM, change the old HD's jumper to slave and plug in the old harddrive where the CD-ROM was. Reboot and you'll see 3 drives. Copy what you want to the new harddrive. Reinstall the CD-ROM and you're good to go. (I'm assuming you have an IDE CD-ROM drive already installed in your machine.)

I hear that partition magic software can help you out but given the cost of the software and the risk that you might lose data using it, I'd go with the new hard drive. I've never used PM so I'm biased against it. Maybe someone who used it would recommend it.

Thank you Lennynj99,
That's a really big help, yea, kinda in a jam.. but now i know and thanx to you i guess i can go on and operate.!

-dukeofhmong

Just as matter of reinforcement. Lennynj99 gave you very good advice, and accurate I might add.


data4t
http://www.howtorecoverdata.com

Thank you for your post! I really apprecieate it.

-dukeofhmong

good advice. Just a note though: from my experience Partition magic does work, and will repartition your disk without losing data. You would want to back up first (which you should always do anyway), but its cheaper than a new drive, if you don't need all the extra space.
I'd probably just get a new 80gig though, if you arent planning to upgrade the computer in the next year or two.