More Upgrades…
I finally gave in and upgraded my main Windows XP box to a bigger, faster system disk. When I first put that box together I thought that I was going to have heaps of space on a 15 odd Gig drive, and so I made the main system partition only 6 Gig big, and made another couple of partitions for data and other programmes.
Mistake. BIG mistake! HUGE!
I have no idea what fills up all the space, as I make sure I clean it out of all the stuff I can, but it’s always getting close to the limit now, and I think that disk is getting a bit old anyway, so both to be safe and to give me more room I thought I’d upgrade to something a bit bigger. Like another 250Gig drive. Just a small difference in space!
I thought that this could be a bit of a pain in the butt to do, as Windows seems to be a bit fussy about where things are etc, but in the end it was a breeze! I used a “live-cd” (a whole operating system that boots and runs off a cd) of gparted, which is a small Linux system soley geared towards disk partitioning actions. This meant I just had to copy the partitions across to the new drive, resize them, change the disks over in the box, removing the old one, reboot a couple of times, and hey-presto! New disk works fine!
And for a bonus, a fun bit of this was using a small business card CD for the first time. I’d been left a few but never really found a use for them, but the whole gparted image fits easily on one. I don’t think I’ll start carrying it around with me in my wallet, but it’s definitely part of my PC toolbox now.
A bit of a relief that it went fine, but also a bit of a bugger on a long weekend! How to fill in the rest of it!? I guess I’ll just have to break something just to fix it…. or spend the time pampering the other half – now that sounds like a plan! (Hmmmm. I think someone added something during the proof reading process….)