Ultimate C-Drive Space Saving: New Heights of Symbolic Link Tricks

Ultimate C Drive Space Saving: Symbolic Links Taken to the Next Level

Before reading this article, I’d like to pose a few questions:

• Why are we so obsessed with saving C drive space?

• If we care so much about C drive space, why not just install Windows on the D drive?

• Why not merge the C and D drives into a single partition?

  Disk capacity is conserved. Disk space cannot be created or destroyed out of thin air. It can only be transferred or converted between different partitions, while the total disk size remains unchanged. The disk is a physical object, and so is its space.

  I believe that, when there’s enough space, our real concern isn’t the C drive itself—it’s our pursuit of extreme minimalism.

So, if your C drive is truly full, there are two scenarios:

• If your D drive also has no spare space, then you really should clean up the C drive. This might also indicate that your computer usage habits aren’t great.

• If your D drive has plenty of space, simply use a tool (like DiskGenius) to allocate some of that extra space to the C drive.

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The following is what this article will discuss.

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Which folders and files in the C drive root directory take up the most space?

• Program Files

• Program Files (x86)

• ProgramData

• Users

• Windows

• pagefile.sys

• hiberfil.sys

  Among these, the first three are folders for installed software, the Users folder contains user data files, and the Windows folder is the core of the Windows system—where Windows itself is installed.

  pagefile.sys is the system paging file, used by the operating system as virtual memory.

  hiberfil.sys is the system hibernation file. If hibernation is not enabled, this file doesn’t exist. This file can be extremely large, but it cannot be moved—it can only be deleted by disabling the hibernation feature.

Let’s jump straight to the conclusion: After testing, all of the above folders except the Windows folder can be moved to the D drive, and then symbolic links can be created in the C drive root directory to free up C drive space.

hiberfil.sys and pagefile.sys cannot be moved.

Personal recommendation: It’s best to copy those folders to the D drive while in a PE environment, because within the Windows system, you may encounter issues where files and folders cannot be copied or moved.

Steps:

• Boot into a PE system, copy Program Files, Program Files (x86), ProgramData, and the Users folder to the D drive.

• Boot back into the main Windows system.

• Use Link Shell Extension to create symbolic links in the C drive root directory for each of these folders now located on the D drive.

  (The process is almost identical to what I described in Article 29, “29 Extra 4: Introduction to Folder Soft Links (Directory Junctions),” except this time we’re creating symbolic links.)

• Boot back into the PE system and delete the original folders from the C drive.

• Rename each symbolic link to match the original folder name.

• Reboot back into the main system.

Done.

As you can see, this method of increasing C drive space isn’t about “deleting” in the traditional sense—it’s about “relocating.” The total amount of files remains unchanged.

But is this approach really meaningful? I don’t think so. If you can do this, it means your D drive has enough space. So why not just use DiskGenius to directly allocate some D drive space to the C drive?

Maybe we just prefer to spread files across different drives rather than cramming everything into one… :)