Repartitioning hard drive on an old Win95 box

[anon]

A neighbor of mine is using a 10 year old Dell running Windows 95. The
8 gig hard drive is partitioned into a 2 gig primary (the C:\ drive),
and an extended partition of three 2 gig logical drives. All of them
FAT, not FAT32.

The C:\ drive is full. The logical drives in the extended partition
are almost empty except for non executable files. To me, the obvious
move is to merge one or more of the drives in the extended partition
into the C:\ drive with Partition Magic.

If this was a contemporary box I wouldn't be hesitant -- I do this
kind of thing often on my own builds. But hardware and Windows from
10 years ago is a different world.

Is there anything a person from the WinXP generation needs to know for
this operation? Can I wizard my way through this on a Win95 box the
way I do on my own machines?

 

[Michael Cecil]

A neighbor of mine is using a 10 year old Dell running Windows 95. The
8 gig hard drive is partitioned into a 2 gig primary (the C:\ drive),
and an extended partition of three 2 gig logical drives. All of them
FAT, not FAT32.

The C:\ drive is full. The logical drives in the extended partition
are almost empty except for non executable files. To me, the obvious
move is to merge one or more of the drives in the extended partition
into the C:\ drive with Partition Magic.

If this was a contemporary box I wouldn't be hesitant -- I do this
kind of thing often on my own builds. But hardware and Windows from
10 years ago is a different world.

Is there anything a person from the WinXP generation needs to know for
this operation? Can I wizard my way through this on a Win95 box the
way I do on my own machines?

You need to check and see what version of W95 is installed. The original
version didn't support FAT32 so it cannot be used to expand those FAT16
drives.

You could still offload some data from the C: drive to the other drives
though. I bet there are all sorts of pictures, etc. that could be moved
to free up some space. Don't forget about purging the various Temp
folders.

 

[Nil]

You could still offload some data from the C: drive to the other
drives though. I bet there are all sorts of pictures, etc. that
could be moved to free up some space. Don't forget about purging
the various Temp folders.

I agree. The actual Windows 95 system folder and files really don't
take up all that much room, probably less than a couple hundred MB. You
can move the TEMP directory, My Documents, Temporary Internet Files,
and swap file all to the other drives without too much problem. It
might be worth moving the program files, too, although that's trickier.
Most foolproof method is to uninstall them and reinstall them to the D
(or whatever) drive. There might be a version of TweakUI for Windows 95
that can help you change the location of those special folders.

As I recall, FAT16 has a partition size limit of about 2 GB, so you're
already at that limit. It's probably not necessary, anyway.

 

[DaveW]

I would be very careful. For instance, do current copies of Partition Magic
even support Win 95 and the older FAT?

 

[Michael Cecil]

I would be very careful. For instance, do current copies of Partition Magic
even support Win 95 and the older FAT?

Yes.