A waste of space

[Tannin]

For reasons that I won't bother going into in any detail right now, I need to temporaily reduce the amount of free space on my C: drive. Yes reduce the free space, but only for a short while.

Obviously, I could just do a massive great copy of some big folders to a temporary folder, and then delete them afterwards, but that's uber-clumsy. Or I could repartition with partition Magic (etc.), then restore the original partitioning scheme afterwards, but that is equally messy, and would require softare I don't have, and is in any case not risk-free.

I seem to remember using a utility program that can do this quickly and neatly some years ago, but have no idea what it was, or even what OS it ran under.

This machine is XP Pro SP3 on NTFS.

Is there an easy way to do this, or should I just do a great big file-copy?

(Why do I need less space? To install some old Win 3.1 software that I cant live without. I'm pretty sure it will run just fine once it is installed, even after I reclaim my wasted space.)

 

[ddrueding]

I know how to do this in Linux; just create a file and misstate how big it is, but I don't know in XP.

 

[Tannin]

Thanks Dave. In the end, I just went the make-a-zillion-copies-of-something-big route. It should be finished in a little while.

 

[Mercutio]

Tannin, why do you not simply make a Virtual machine for this software? It'd take all of 30 seconds to install Win3.1 or for that matter OS/2 (well, OK, maybe FIVE minutes for OS/2) under VMware.

 

[Howell]

Thanks Dave. In the end, I just went the make-a-zillion-copies-of-something-big route. It should be finished in a little while.

I wrote a small batch program last year to make a 512MB text file that I copy over and over. It is for a similar purpose. The nice thing is that when it is zipped up it is very small as the contents are a repetition of a single character.

 

[Howell]

XenServer is the way to go man.

 

[Tannin]

Good question, Merc. Answer: simply because I don't know what benefit there would be in having a VM. Apart from the install routine's problem with too much disc space - which afflicts me once every three years when I buy a new laptop - I can't think what benefit it would provide that I don't already have. XP handles Win 3.1 applications pretty well (not as nice as OS/2, but nice enough for practical purposes) and once installed Quattro Pro is trouble-free. (And still the best spreadsheet ever made!) I can do all the usual cut & paste between apps stuff, flick in and flick out as required, and all with zero administrative overhead.

Would would I gain out of the complexity of a VM? I only ever tried using a VM once, maybe this time last year, probably to get a true native version of W2K or Internet Explorer for website testing or something like that - I can't actually think what my reason would have been now - and remember chewing up a fair bit of space and adding extra start-up stuff, can't remember what the point of it all was now.

Howell: Now that is clever! "aaaaaaaaaaaaa" = all the same letter = zips down to nothing but still takes up space. Neat!

I just copied some big image folders from the second physical drive. Took an hour, maybe. It was finished when I got back to it, at any rate. I also discovered that it doesn't seem to matter how much or how little space there is on the destination drive, it might be the space on the default drive that makes the difference. At any rate, after getting my install done OK. I experimented a little and discovered that the install routine seems to run OK over a network even where there is masses of free space on C:.

Anyway, the job is done now. Presumably I'll be back to ask the same question in another three years or so, having forgotten all this.

 

[mubs]

Sigh. If only you'd given a bit of time.

I have three programs from long ago that do this. I haven't used them in years, but the file stamps from 2002, 2003 and 2005. They're called MakeBigFile, Spacehog, and CreateTestFile.

All three programs together are 576kb in size, so I can easily email them to you. AFAIR, they are all free to use (or I wouldn't have downloaded them; if I did, they would have gone into a special folder called shareware).

Let me know if you need them for future use. They live in drive:\downloads\utils\diskutils\bigfile so I found them in seconds.

 

[Tannin]

Spacehog. I know that name! It must have been the one I used last time I needed to do this job, Mubs ..... which come to think of it, wouldn't have been ~3 years ago when I bought the R52, it would have been ~1 year before that when I bought the previous Thinkpad.

But no drama, I had some other jobs to do anyway, so I just started a few big folders of photographs copying over and and did some real (i.e., paid) work in the meantime.

 

[Tea]

A typical Tannin job: where is the point in expertise, elegance, and the right tool for the job when you have mindless brute force to call on?

 

[Mercutio]

Good question, Merc. Answer: simply because I don't know what benefit there would be in having a VM.

Here's the answer, and it's a deeply simple one: So you won't have to do it again.

You've got some legacy program that you need to access on every machine you have? Install OS/2 or Win 3.1 or Win95 in a VM, and install the program in that. The file is portable to whatever machine you happen to be using.

We're all going to find ourselves needing to do more and more of this as time goes on. My favorite DOS game doesn't run on Vista. My Windows image viewer of choice won't run on 64-bit Windows. My copy of Wordperfect won't run on Linux 2.6 kernels (well, it will, if I do a lot more work than it's worth to me); we might as well just go ahead and set up that VM now. It's not like a Windows 3.1 guest takes up a whole lot in the way of system resources on our quad-core, 2GB+ machines.

I suppose another possible answer might've been to install your program to a thumb drive of appropriate size. You could then copy the files over to a directory and SUBST the directory to the proper drive letter, assuming it's one of those things that isn't content to leave its files in one nice directory.

 

[Tannin]

Thanks Merc. You are making sense to me. Not for this job - it's a lot easier to copy a few files and waste some space for 10 minutes every three years than it is to set up a VM, and I wind up with my Win 3.1 app running native with zero overhead - but I can see here it might become useful down the track.

Let's say, for example, that Photoshop CS4 or CS5 introduces a 64-bit edition that really is lots faster than the 32-bit edition. That would require a 64-bit Windows, and that would break all sorts of stuff. So a VM might be the answer.

Or maybe PMView will finally become available in a Linux version, at which point Photoslug might be the only thing holding me back from dumping Windows and going 'nix all the way, so a VM might be the answer there too (depending on how WINE copes with Photoslug).

Is this the sort of thing you have in mind?

 

[ddrueding]

WINE does very nicely with Photoshop. I can't get it to run in Server 2003 (because I can't get SP2 installed), but in WINE 1.0 in Ubuntu 8.04 it does very nicely.