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    Turn Partition into Read-Only?

    Discussion in 'Hardware Components and Aftermarket Upgrades' started by Romanian, Sep 8, 2007.

  1. Romanian

    Romanian Notebook Evangelist

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    So, I have two partitions on my HDD. C: which is 1.2GB and D: which is 118GB or something. My problem is that a lot of things which get updated have default path as C:\Program Files\xxxx\xxxxx and this is eating up all of the space. I now have 32mb left on my first partition. Is there any way that I can make that one read-only, so that the automatic updates will be forced to be saved under D?

    Thanks in advance.
     
    Romanian, Sep 8, 2007
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  2. Jalf

    Jalf Comrade Santa

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    Even if you could (I'm not aware of any way to do this), it woulnd't "force" anything to be saved on D. It'd just cause the programs that would otherwise save to C:, to crash instead.

    The problem is crappily written programs that hardcode the installation path (such as C:\Program Files. The C: isn't the only problem. Program Files also isn't called Program Files under non-English versions of Windows)

    The "ideal" way to solve this is to email the developer and tell them to stop screwing around like this, and write decent software... :D

    A more realistic way is to set up NTFS junction points (basically work like Linux symbolic links). That way, you can turn C:\Program Files into a link that actually points to, say, D:\Program Files. Anything that's installed to the former, physically ends up under the latter. (But can still be accessed from C:\Program Files as well)

    There are a few problems with this too (mainly that the same stupid programs will still see that you only have 32MB free on C:, and will probably then refuse to install, even though they could easily be installed, because it'd use up disk space from D: instead), but it's the best solution I've found.

    I've also given in, and just made sure my C: drive has enough space left over to handle such screwy programs. My Windows partition is currently 25GB simply because that way I've got enough free space to fool stupid installers. Both Program Files and Docs & Settings are linked to another partition (with 200GB free), so I don't really *use* the free space on my Windows partition. It just has to be there so crappy programs don't think I have too little free space.
     
    Jalf, Sep 8, 2007
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