hosed

many many years ago (i think 2002) when i got my computer, i decided to partition my hard drive into 3 sections -- one for the OS, one for programs, and one for my personal information. i figured, 7GB of space would be enough for the OS. unfortunately, i didn't realize that even though i installed the programs on a different partition, things were still being written into my OS partition. so over years, my OS partition has run out of space. the past month, i've had 600MB max of free space on my OS partition, so i've been trying to free up space by uninstalling all the programs i didn't need, doing disk cleanup almost every week, etc.

finally, last week, i just got fed up after i got the "You are running low on disk space" message for the third time in a week. i decided right then to reformat and reinstall windows on my machine. who would have thought it would take the whole day to figure out how to do it? the first problem i ran into was that i would run the setup for Windows XP in my old version of XP. when you do this, it copies the install files onto your harddrive. no big deal, right? well, it is if you have partitioned your drive b/c you can't delete the partition and remerge all the undeleted partitions into one chunk b/c the setup files are on the partition. so all i had to do was just boot from the CD. simple, right? no, not for my computer. my desktop doesn't have a CD-ROM in the tower itself (it's generally used as a small server computer i think); i have had to use the USB external CD-ROM to connect to it. we tried changing the BIOS, but it didn't detect the USB port that was connected to the CD-ROM. grrr. we tried copying the setup files we need (from a reference online) to a USB key. the BIOS detected the USB, but it couldn't boot from the USB.

by this time, we had just given up. nat was going to try to switch the harddrive out from my current computer into an older computer that had a CD-ROM and wipe and reinstall the harddrive; he was going to do that the next day b/c we were so frustrated and tired. by a stroke of luck, we had one of nat's friends over for a game that night. he suggested opening up the computer, taking out the CD-ROM from my old computer and attaching it to my current computer and installing from there. it was quite a hack job, but fortunately my current computer had an IDE spot for the CD-ROM. i had to connect the power of the CD-ROM to my old computer b/c the power didn't match for my current computer. it looked like frankenstein, but with computers.

to my joy, it worked. it booted from the CD, i wiped and reinstall, and now i have all this space on my computer. :) yippee. :) i must say, as a neat freak, i like how there is minimal stuff on my computer right now. :) i realized after cleaning up my harddrive multiple times before i reinstalled that not all programs will delete all the folders and files that are associated with a given program during an uninstall.

my computer is running, i have lots of harddrive space, and very minimal stuff on my computer. ahh. i feel good. :)