the problem is, I have been using this fine 298Gb HD for a while. and its been full more than just a few times.. right now I have about 20Gb free. only that it is not on the end nor on the beginning. and so far my defragmenting efforts havent helped.. so what do you suggest to do ? I have ~250Gb of anime that I dont want to lose.. and if I'm not misstaken, repartitioning with partition magic doesnt move the data so that I wouldnt lose anything. or ?
the reason for this operation is that I've gotten fed up with system going bad, wanting to do a clean good installation and then take a image with either Ghost or Drive Image and if something fails, going back with it. which one the board members suggest on using ? or some other product ?
also, I'm open to suggestion on the programs I should have installed on the moment I take the image

Deepone,

Sometimes with defraggers you have to set them to run at boot time (like Diskeeper) to "pack" the disk the way you want.

I wouldn't recommend partitioning s/w. That might fail since you don't have a contiguous block the the beginning or end of your disk space.

But save off your anime BEFORE you do anything. Defragging, partitioning, or Drive Image/Ghost all recommend that you backup BEFORE you run them in case of a failure. It is software after all. One power glitch during a cleanup procedure can ruin your setup.

I've never had a problem, but be careful regardless. I'd hate to see you lose your collection.

captbics

the problem is that I have too much data to backup the total capasity of my other HD's could barely be enough to hold anime, but then I would have to get rid of about everything else.
thanks for the boot-time tip tho, I'll try if I can setup xp to do something on the next boot. or maybe I'll just give that diskeeper a shot..

I have a similar setup with a 300 Gig Drive .. got worried, realized there was no way ( that i had) to back -up it all, so i bought another drive and set up a mirrored raid set ... problem solved. I pulled the 2nd drive out after the mirror and if the other drive fails. I'll just swap drives .... back up to where I was to start with ... as far as what to install before the "back-up", install XP, let it run for a week, then back it up .. in that amount of time you'll have your "base" install setup like you like it.

Peace.

Before I went to all this effort I would try to defrag using Diskeeper or equivalent program. Make sure that if you use Diskeeperyou set it to run at boot up to do a complete and thorough defrag (See Captics comment). If this doesn't work then you are stuck with the other solutions given (new hard drive)