Hard drive Problems? Newt, anyone?

[mpbdsnu]

My father-in-law acquired a computer which apparently has a hard drive that is split? (did'nt know till after) Personally I have never heard of this, but looking into 'My Computer', this does appear to be the case.

 

As he wants to run a number of items together, he keeps using up all the memory available! Trouble is, only one half the split drive's being used? Any ideas on how to resolve his problem please?

[John S]

Sounds like the hard drive has been partitioned, effectively making it into two or more drives. I've partitioned mine giving only a relatively small amount for the C drive, and I don't install anything on that other than Windows. Everything else goes onto the other drives.

 

In My Computer, what are the sizes of the two drives? Try installing onto the other (D) drive and see if that works

[mpbdsnu]

Thanks John, I'll have a look.

[Colin Brett]

Get yourself a copy of Partition Magic and you can play all day at increasing and decreasing partitions. Really good fun.

Colin

[mpbdsnu]

I had assumed, from the description of what had been happening by my father-in-law, that the drive had filled and no memory was available!

 

On closer inspection I see that the 2 drives have ample memory: C = 7.98GB, and D = 10.9GB.

 

The problem only seems to occur when he is using 'Incredimail' as his mail server. He has a friend who always send emails with background pics and music. His screen just goes blank on occasions after receiving a message to the effect: 'Windows is closing the programme down due to insufficient memory' - or something like!

 

Any further ideas please?

[Newt]

Not an uncommon practice to divide a hard drive and - as John does - keep your system files in one section and all others in another. Makes it easier to figure out where your data is but can be more confusing for the user.

 

If you do find this to be the case and don't like the idea, there is a program called "Partition Magic" that will allow you to manipulate the size of the two pieces without losing any data. You could pretty much make your C: partition large enough to hold everything, move everything to there, and then do away with the other D: partition and enlarge C: to the full size of the drive.

 

One caution is that programs installed to the D: partition are likely not to run if simply moved to C:

 

To make matters even a little more confusing, there could be more than one physical hard drive in the computer.

[mpbdsnu]

Thanks Newt.

[Newt]

mpbdsnu - FWIW, memory and hard drive space (storage) are completely different things. Easy enough to run out of memory when you have lots of drive space available.

 

If he continues to have "out of memory" issues, there are several possibilities.

 

1. All programs use memory while they are active. They do all their work there. Some programs are not polite about releasing memory after they are done working though and may even grab a new chunk next time while holding (but not using) the original memory. This is often refered to as a "memory leak". There are several applications available that can scan a system and free up memory that is not actually being used.

 

2. The PC should be set with some of it's hard drive space blocked off to be used as "virtual memory" which means the PC will place data onto the hard drive rather than leaving it in memory. Slower if you have to access the program that is "swapped out" but it does work. The setting for this could be way low.

 

3. The PC has a finite amount of some other resources and if they are all used up, they problem will be incorrectly reported as "out of memory" when in fact, there is plenty of memory available. An example is the setting for "maximum files open at one time". If this is set at 1000 and you attempt to open a file that would be 1001, you will be told you are out of memory.

 

Could you give other system details please - operating system version, amount of physical memory in the PC, and such. Maybe I can give you an idea where to start troubleshooting this issue.