Swapping and re-designating drives

[Bus429]

My mother's PC is experiencing problems with her C drive. It is constantly notified as having too little space left and, despite cleaning it up and recovering about 560MB, after boot up, that goes down to 250 ish and then lower. The drive is virtually full of programme files with all documents and pictures moved to another drive designated HDD. This latter drive has twice the capacity of the C drive so I'd like to swap them around. Can this be done?
The PC runs XP SP2 and, as a complication, I'm trying to sort it out from 500 km away using www.logmein.com to access it through my computer.

[Mac the Knife]

With the NTFS filing system you can move folders such as Program Files (or sub-folders in it) to another drive, leaving behind a reparse point that points to the new location. Familiar to all *NIX users. I've done this on my sons PC and several others and it works cleanly and transparently.

Several good free GUI utilities to do this but I prefer Junction Link Magic (http://www.rekenwonder.com/linkmagic.htm)

I hesitate to post this because unless you know what you are doing and RTFM carefully it is possible to make a considerable Horlicks of your OS.

:ok:

Mac

[spannersatcx]

Buy a new hard drive, I just got a 1TB for <£50, and use something like EASUS to copy the old to new. and it's free (http://www.partition-tool.com/)

Not sure you can just swap drives around something to do do with master boot and such stuff!

[Bus429]

Cheers, all.
Spanners, you still at MAN? I visited there recently as part of a project for TCX.

[Saab Dastard]

recovering about 560MB, after boot up, that goes down to 250 ish and then lower

If that isn't the page file (which you can and should re-locate to the other drive), then you have some more investigating to do.

SD

[Mac the Knife]

Link Shell Extension is another excellent utility for creation and management of Hardlinks, Junctions, Volume Mountpoints and Symbolic Links. They have a good web-page explaining the concepts.

Link Shell Extension (http://schinagl.priv.at/nt/hardlinkshellext/hardlinkshellext.html)

Using the file system appropriately can really make situations like those described by the OP very simple to handle. No need to buy new drives or mess with drive duplication software.

Mac