Formatting a D drive with old system files on it

[jurbie]

I have two drives in my laptop both of which have system files on them. It seems clear that everything is booting from the C drive so I assume I'm fine to format the D drive and use it purely for storage? It's showing as nearly 50% full so I assume it's still got a full Windows installation on it that I'm guessing I don't need anymore so it would be nice to reclaim that space.

[frisbee]

You could always take the drive out and see if the PC boots ok off of just the C drive.

I recently replaced the 2nd drive in my laptop with a solid state drive after it started failing. It was pretty easy, just 10-ish screws and the bottom came off.

[jurbie]

It's certainly an option but I'm not keen to start dismantling it because it's quite old and I've taken it apart a few times already replacing the battery, fitting the SSDs etc. It now seems that it's at a point that it just doesn't quite fit back together as well as it should.

[chrisman]

Rename it in disk manager from drive D: to drive X: or something and see if anything breaks. You can always rename it back if needed.

[blackscooby]

You could install " TreeSize Free" from JAM software and scan your D Drive, It'll tell you which directory structure is the space hog straight away.
I use Treesize Free on all my Windows boxes, fab piece of software.

[captain_cynic]

blackscooby said:

You could install " TreeSize Free" from JAM software and scan your D Drive, It'll tell you which directory structure is the space hog straight away.
I use Treesize Free on all my Windows boxes, fab piece of software.

If you want a free and open source alternative that doesn't require an install, check out Spaesniffer.

Far better GUI IMHO.

Formatting a drive to free up space is a bit drastic.

[jurbie]

I'm not bothered about what's on it, I just want to use it for storage so just need to be sure that nothing is still using the system files. I assume not because it looks like the last time any of the system files were updated was at the start of the year which is about when I swapped the drives around.