How do I move everything that is not Vista to the D: drive

[EricHH]

I purchased my Y510 Ideapad a few weeks ago.  250GB Hard drive, 2 gig RAM with Intel Core 2 duo processor.  Great computer.  We love it so far.

BUT: I am running out of space on my C: partition.  I barely have enough room for the Vista SP1 dowload.  How do I remove everything (pictures, movies, documents etc) to the D: drive?  I am a relative novice when it comes to the finer aspects of programming.  Do I need to move the programs (such as Microsoft Office Suite) to the D: as well?  Do I simply cut and paste?  How do I ensure that everything automatically gets saved to the D: drive?

I am very much impressed with the forum and have learned alot although I still lag far behind.  With this in mind, please be as specific as possible with any answers any of you may have.  Thank you in advance!

[skripatch]

Programs can't be cut&paste to another place, since there's a great amount of keys in registry for them that hard fix their place to work with.
Moving any other folder i nVista is simple - just rightclick on folder and in it's properties go to "location" tab. The folder you're going to transfer to must exist beforehand.
Also you may change location of swapfile. This article will help to understand.

[EricHH]

Thank you for the reply Skripatch.

I was able to copy pictures and music into the D drive.  This gave me another 4 gig or so of space.  But because of this they no longer show up when I run programs.  For example, when I open up windows media player, none of the music I downloaded is there. 

I may be making a bigger deal out of this than I need to.  It does seem weird to me that all of the programs that came with the computer would save files automatically to the C: drive instead of the D: drive, especially since the stated purpose of the C: drive is to accomodate the OKR system. 

I spoke to a fairly helpful Lenovo support specialist who told me that is the case: nothing but Vista should be on the C: drive.

Does Lenovo offer a tutorial on how to organize and clean up this problem?

[Fulong]

@ EricHH

I hear this a lot myself, when it comes to pre-configured systems. The thing is, it's common for the manufacture to only provide a restore image, usually in a hidden partition. If I'm not mistaken on the Lenovo Y510, by changing your operating system partition size would basically incapacitate your restore image ability to replace the OEM pre-installed Vista operating system.

I would suggest that you just create your own backup image, and save it to an external hard drive instead.

Because the benefits are:

1) Reclaim your hidden partition memory
2) resize your active primary partition to whatever size you need
3) Ability to restore (all your data) and replace your Lenovo Y510 hard drive due to failure

I recommend using the Acronis True Image Echo Workstation software:

www.acronis.com/enterprise/download/ATICW/

Ps. you might look into "Hiren's Boot CD", as it would have all the tools to do both backup and partition here. Just google online as it's NOT sold anywhere.

[shoguevara]

EricHH Just move the My documets' folder location from it's context menu to the place you've moved all your personal data - that should help.

[EricHH]

Shoguevarra,

Thanks!  That did help alot.  Plus I didn't realize how quickly Vista would "learn" the file path for my downloads.  Thank you!