Set up a new hard disk so Windows makes the best use of the extra

Q With the intention of extending the life of my ageing desktop PC, whose 180GB hard disk is nearly full, I have installed a second internal 500GB hard disk.

Will Windows XP automatically use this disk as the other runs out of space, or will I only be able to use the extra disk by actively saving data to it?
Andrew Currie

A Unfortunately, Windows will not automatically use the new hard disk as the old one fills up – it’s up to you to make use of it.

How you do this depends on what’s filling up the main hard disk. If it is primarily documents, then you can move the existing My Documents folder.

To do this right-click the current My Documents folder, select Properties and then click the Move button to transfer it to the new drive.

Simply dragging and dropping the My Documents to the new drive won’t do, because Windows will not keep track of the moving process.

Transferring installed programs to the new disk, however, is so tedious as to not be worth it. Nor would we advise installing new programs to the new disk – some will always assume they are on the ‘C:’ drive, which will cause problems with the way they run.

If you’re a bit more technical, a better solution would be to use a program such as Acronis True Image Home 11 (£40) to first clone the old hard disk to the new one, then expand its existing 180GB partition to fill the available space.

Now make the new 500GB disk the PC’s primary disk and you will have 320GB of free space. The old disk can then be removed or reformatted and used as a second disk.