I have a Dell Workstation with dual 10 GB hard drives. I don't have a ton of stuff installed on my C drive, but every time I try to install something, I get an error message stating that I don't have enough room on my drive. I don't see how this is possible. I'm running Win NT, and I can't find where you check to see how much free space vs. used space you have on your hard drive. Where do I find this, and any suggestions on what could be the problem I'm having?
From your desktop, double-click on "My Computer", then right-click on your C: drive, and then choose properties. You should see a little pie chart pop up that represents your disk capacity, and your free and used space. Write back with the figures it shows.
Used 1.97GB Free 24.2MB Capacity 1.99GB Is there any way my computer could misread the amount of memory I have?
mjt - From the numbers, you're just flat out of space on your C drive. Chances are that when Dell configured your machine, that 10 GB drive was partitioned into a C drive and an E drive (maybe more). They installed Windows and base software on the 2 GB C drive and you've got 8GB sitting available on the E drive. If you've been installing software, you've probably been installing it on the C drive instead of the E drive and so you've been consuming more of the limited drive space. Check your "My Computers" and see if you have E: and more drives. Then install your software on your E drive instead of your C drive. Also, try checking the C:\temp directory to see how much space is used there. Also, delete your temporary internet files (via your browser) - there can be a lot of space used there. Also, if you have personal files stored on the C drive, try moving them to the E drive to free up space on C:. Good luck.
mjt, The reason why I wanted you to report back the numbers is because I suspected that your capacity would be 1.99 GB, as you stated it was. I too had the exact same problem as you on an IBM Intellistation I purchased about a year ago. After investigating the problem further, I discovered that the manufacturer had chosen to install NT using the FAT file system. In a nutshell, FAT disk partitions can't be greater than 2048 MB or approximately 2 GB. Once Windows gets installed, it can eat up 50% of that space by itself. In my case, IBM also installed a bunch of other stuff along with Windows NT on that same 2 GB partition like electronic books, proprietary diagnostic software, and all sorts of other stuff. So even though it was a brand new machine, it only had about 400 MB of available space on the C: drive, which I later found out was about enough to install MS Office and a few other programs. They didn't bother to set up additional partitions on that same disk. So the whole time I thought that the C: drive represented my entire 10 GB disk, when in fact it only represented about 1/5th of the available space on the drive. If you don't already have a d: or e: drive, you'll have to create them yourself using NT's disk administrator. But one thing is for sure: you'll need to start removing some of the programs you have installed on your C: drive and reinstall them on another partition or a totally different hard disk to free up some of the disk space on C: that windows will need to perform its normal operations. Otherwise, your system could become pretty unstable.