2) Moving the swap file, a good option with few ramifications. Moving the swap will disable the ability to dump all memory to disk in leiu of a minidump in a BSOD but most people don’t use this feature anyway.

Windows 2000
1. In Control Panel, double-click System.
2. Click the Advanced tab.
3. Click Performance options.
4. Click Change under Virtual Memory.
5. Select the new drive that you want to use to store the paging file.
6. Set Initial Size (MB) and Maximum size. For the initial size, Microsoft recommends using the recommended value in the Total Page File Size for All Drives box.
7. Click Set, and then click OK twice.
8. Click Restart Now.

3. The discussion of dynamic disks. First, in 2000 any partitions made before the conversion to dynamic disks are locked and you can’t resize system or boot partitions. So in order to add space to the 2nd partition on the new drive. You’d have to back up D. Delete the 2nd partition. Convert drive 0 to dynamic. Recreate the partition anew on the dynamic disk and format NTFS. I may be a little rust here so bare with me. Select the new drive (Disk1) in disk manager and convert (May require 2 reboots) to dynamic. Back into disk manager, right click the free section of disk 1 and start the wizard to extend the D partition and create a spanned volume. Once complete, restore the data to the new D partition. Wallah.

Now if that new drive goes bad …you lose all the the data on the combined D partition. So, I’d personally expand the C: and D: partition on reghost to your new larger drive.

Keep the old drive as a backup or once your new system is stable, I’d slick the old drive add it in as a extended drive for data, maybe format fat 32. Create a Win 9x boot disk with the ghost.exe executable and then create a regular compressed ghost image to the drive for DR purposes. Call me paranoid but in the end, how valuable is your data and how long do you wan’t to take to recover the system?

Best Luck

First and foremost dynamic drives tack on extra space at the price that if one drive fails all info may become inaccessible on all drives. That is not true in every case but for most users not into tinkering etc it is just a situation to avoid. Also the more drives added the slower the combined disks tend to act as disk get searched sequentially for where files are stored or if they exist. This may not be something your usage finds important…but then maybe it is.

Second it is always a little risky letting eveything go to C: because that is where the OS lives. If C: gets screwed up it is lot more problem than finding D: is full. Having a system that won’t boot or stay on long enough to fix using normal tools is one big reason.

The advantage of a basic drive D: on a second drive is that in the event of drive failure (or virus, etc) It is quite possible that the other drive is still intact. If C: is intact you have an OS and likely your backup/restore capabilities to get data on D: drive back. If D: is intact and that is where most you data is…well at least you have your data already when you reinstall your OS.

In fact if you don’t get carried away there are backup/restore advantages to having several separate basic drives formatted, whether just on patitions of the same drive or actual separate drives. Isolating your data from programs that seldom change can reduce the size routine full backups. You might have installation source on another drive to help simplify reinstall should the C: drive die — that install source drive would only need backup on are ocassions. It helps to limit C: drive to just the OS, swap file and a few vital utilities or at least to separate data. You can even control and optimize pagefiles (swap file) by giving it is own partition perferrably on a different physical drive from the high activity OS and progam disks. Most private citizen and normal corporate users never use a C: drive dumpfile or know what to do with one.

Yes, converting your disk to Dynamic and then creating an extended partition will certainly resolve your space issues.

As for moving your page file, note that is you move or delete your page file from the system partition you will gain some space, but you will loose the ability to create a dump file (*.dmp) which can be very helpfull in the event your system crashes. To create a dump file you need to have minimum, a page file equal to the amount of physical memory in your computer (i.e. 512MB RAM – Page file 512MB). Since you have an extra HDD available, you might consider installing it, create a partition or volume and then create a page file of 1 1/2 or 2 x your physical memory. This will be for file swapping. On your system partition set your current page file to it’s minimum size equal to physical memory. This will be enough to create that .dmp file during crashes. By having a page file on a seperate HDD you’ll increase performance of your computer.

Good luck!

Option 2: I believe you should able to accomplish this if you convert your drive to Dynamic Disk, but I havent tried that myself. Dynamic disk has a couple drawbacks like no dual boot with different OS’s, no reverting back away from Dynamic to Basic… but perhaps they wont apply to you. Read some about it here: http://www.computerperformance.co.uk/Litmus/disk_dynamic.htm

Good luck