Hey what’s up everyone? Here's my dilemma. I am formatting my hard drive within the next week and installing a fresh copy of windows xp on it. My hard drive is partitioned right now, one partition for windows and one for all my other crap. The problem is that the one for windows is too small so I’m going to format it and make the space allocated larger. Anyway, i don't want to loose all of my "other crap" most of it is ISO's of cds that are long gone, and there’s so many of them that burning them would take FOREVER. The ISOs and the rest of the files amount to roughly 44 gigs. Is there any software out there that can compress this significantly? What I want to do is compress it to about 30 gigs or less if possible and send the compressed file to my laptop via the network I have set up. I've used winrar in the past, but it didn't really reduce the size by much, unless I just didn't know what I was doing. Any user-friendly software suggestions would be great, and if its not so user friendly than any software with good instructions would help. Thanks.
As far as I know, Windows is not compatible with any compressed filesystem except their own. And by "their own", I mean the algorythms they literally stole from Stacker almost a decade ago. In my knowledge, the only way to compress a modern Windows volume is after the OS is already installed.
I think you misunderstood, I want to compress the all the files now, as they are on my current hard drive running on windows, so that i can send them all to my laptop's hard drive. This way i can format the PC then install windows on it again. When i'm done formatting, then i send the big compressed file back to the PC hard drive and unpack it all. IN other words all i want to do is store the files on a different hard drive, but ineed to compress them b/c my laptop is only 40 gigs and the files that i want to compress amount to 44, if i could bring it below 35 in compressed state it would be awesome.
I don't know of any compression algorithms that can reduceit by that much. I would personally just try WinRAR and put it on highest compression setting.
Best way I can think of is to us UHARC, I generally find it compresses 10-15% better than RAR. You can get the GUI version here. Although I have yet to try it (still using cmd line version), compression I'm guessing should be the same.
