"How did this happen!?"

[laptop-mechanic.livejournal.com]

Hi $Customer.

Your hard drive is full. And as you can see, Windows XP cannot fucntion with 129MB of free space.

You ask me how this happened? Well, I'll tell you:

Some braindead moronic asshat at Sony decided years ago that it would be an awesome idea for them to sell computers with 1 hard drive divided up into 2 partitions.  They made the C: drive (you know, the drive where everything important is stored) a piddly size of 13GB, and partitioned the remaining 55GB as D:. Which you probably didnt even know you had, since the whole D: drive had nothing on it.

And you were crazy enough to buy it.  So I honestly do not have much sympathy for you. How can I fix it? Well, on some of these Sony's the recovery media will let you specify the size of the C: drive during recovery. Hopefully yours is one of them. Or we can fool around with the partition system on the drive and hope nothing gets eaten.

Next time, invest in some quality hardware. $deity knows Sony is no such animal.

Comments

[mouse-from-marz.livejournal.com]

my laptop harddrive is just for the OS and the antivirus - WoW, games, whatever are all on the external - I fail to understand why they can't put at least 250GB HD on the lappy, or the partitioning thing... that's what recovery disks are for!

[laptop-mechanic.livejournal.com]

All the recovery discs will do is rebuild the same boneheaded partition scheme.

[mouse-from-marz.livejournal.com]

lovely. what exactly is the point of the partition scheme???

[ucnu112.livejournal.com]

Norton PartitionMagic (http://www.symantec.com/norton/partitionmagic)?

[dukesnorre.livejournal.com]

Maybe they just wanted to keep their data on the happy drive in stead of the sad drive. If they use data from the sad drive they might become sad as well!

[laptop-mechanic.livejournal.com]

Oh, there are certainly solutions. But this is the sort of thing that should never have happened in the first place. I cannot imagine what the thought process behind this plan was. It doesn't make any sense at all.

[ucnu112.livejournal.com]

We had the same problem as you mentioned in some HP laptops we had a couple years ago. I think this time, it was Corporate that set the partition sizes. When XP SP2 rolled out, the laptops started failing, and the problem was traced to too small of a C: Drive. A little PartitionMagic later, and all was well.

[jecook]

The recovery software that came with my vaio back in 2002 did let you specify the size of the c drive, although you had to select a custom restore to get that option.

As for the longevity of sony's stuff? The machine still *works*, but there are a few things that just don't do what I'd like it to do- play divx encoded files is one of them. (Apparently due to a conflict with the shite-tastic video drivers that I can't upgrade and DX9) That, and the batteries are shot on it.
*ponders tossing linux on it again for grins and giggles to see what happens*

[laptop-mechanic.livejournal.com]

There isnt one, best I can tell. Which was part of the point of the rant. =)

[argonel.livejournal.com]

It isn't a bonehead partition scheme if you put /home and /usr/local on the second partition. It definately become boneheaded when you use that partition scheme and install windows on it.

I wonder if it didn't come from setting up a master image on a 20Gb with a semi reasonable recovery partition, then using the same image when they upgaded the hard drive to a 65GB model.

[laptop-mechanic.livejournal.com]

Modern Sony hardware is not built anywhere near that well. Hell, even in 2002, they were not all that great. I'd say you got very lucky. =)

[falnfenix]

oh, so they improved it from the 1999 release of Shit In A Box (otherwise known as their desktops).

[laptop-mechanic.livejournal.com]

Nope. The default Sony recovery scheme did this. And it puts NOTHING on the D: drive at all. And there was no actual recovery partition. All the recovery software does is split the drive up and put the factory image on the small one.

Back before my linux box had an engineering causality, I had the drive parititioned with /home, /tmp/ and /var seperate, and that can at least be justified. I cant think of a single good reason to partition a machine like this in Windows.

[spaz-own-joo.livejournal.com]

How can I fix it? Well, on some of these Sony's the recovery media

Not to be obtuse or anything, but did you suggest, uh, moving some files from the full partition to the empty one?

[spaz-own-joo.livejournal.com]

vlc player (http://www.videolan.org/vlc/)

[pikaporeon.livejournal.com]

This this this.

[laptop-mechanic.livejournal.com]

"wait, you mean they wont be in my documents anymore? BUT HOW WILL I FIND THEM?!"

So yeah, I tried that line already.

[spaz-own-joo.livejournal.com]

Create a shortcut to the drive. Put the shortcut inside My Documents.

"Here is a magical folder on your computer which has more room in it than the folder it's in! We designed this technology by reverse engineering Mary Poppins' handbag."

[laptop-mechanic.livejournal.com]

Heh.

[thecrazyfinn.livejournal.com]

Note that if you're using NTFS, you could set it up to have \Users on the second drive/partition. NTFS can mount partitions as folders.

Requires Clue and some mucking around though.

[laptop-mechanic.livejournal.com]

I thought about it. However, this machine has never ever been reloaded since it was purchased new 5 years ago. XP is way past senile. I'm counseling the owner (read: "this is what you will do") to restore the machine. I've also upgraded it from 256MB to 1GB of memory, which will help as well.

I'm hopeful that the recovery software will let me allocate the full size of the drive to C: and not even fool with D:. It'll make it much easier all the way around.

[simoncion.livejournal.com]

Hnnh. I never knew that!

Then again, I'm not IT, and haven't used Windows for anything but games (and programming @ work) in nearly a decade.

[vulpisfoxfire.livejournal.com]

Indeed--I'm running XP on a 60GB drive with a 10GB system partition, (granted, that seems to be marginal--anyone around know whether it's safe to deleted that f-ing huge 'SoftwareDistribution' folder? I reinstalled recently due to other issues, and the SP3 files are apparently gobbling over a gig there in addition to wherever they installed to)--thing is, I'm also smart enough to put my data files on another partition--as well as my games and other such large installs (They give that 'install directory' option for a reason, after all).

[simoncion.livejournal.com]

It's a horrible shame that partitions are the *only* think that you can mount as folders. Oh what I would give to be able to dump an SMB share into some random point in the FS...
I would give even more (if that's even possible!) to make those "folder-mounted" SMB shares transparent to all apps (except for defraggers and the like) running on the system.

[gholam.livejournal.com]

SoftwareDistribution folder is Windows Update cache. You can safely delete it (stop automatic updates service before you do), Windows Update will re-download whatever it needs.