Does C drive need to have space to pull up other drives?

[sharp461]

So I have 2 other drives along with my main C drive where Windows is installed, and just this morning when I booted up the computer I got a message saying my other drives need to be formatted (been using these drives for years without problems) and so I said no but then they didn't show up in My Computer. I then noticed my C had like 1 GB of space left out of 250. So thinking it was hardware problems I unplugged one of the drives and booted up to test another and then that drive showed up again, and this time C drive had 30 GB space left. Not sure how it jumped up so much (and another problem which Ive noticed is C seems to fluctuate between how much space it really does have but that's a problem for another time ) .

So with this drive now showing I am copying all my files to an external drive in case the drive actually is failing, and so while I wait I was wondering if C has so few space would it prevent the other drives from showing up? I am also in the process of trying to clean up C as well to give it more space, but I would still like to know if that may be why the drives failed to load properly.

 

[Shaun o]

No a lack of free space should never effect the fact of other drives not showing.
It may indicate that the C: drive has errors on it, since it is has and loads windows from the drive to memory any corruption of it could of caused the error as to why the other drives did not show.

Each drive is treated as a separate working device in windows.
The only other thing that would cause the problem of other drives not showing would be windows could not set the drive assignments of the other drives.

D: E: ect.

Or that you have a single drive that is partitioned three times to create a D: and E: drive.
Then in that case they are dependant on the primary partition being healthy and error free the C: partition.

 

[sharp461]

OK, thanks for the reply. That is what I was thinking too, but now here is another strange question.

So I gained some space back on C and brought it to 90 GB, then I plugged in that one drive I had unplugged earlier and booted up and the computer finally showed both drives again, but now I noticed my C is back down to having only 60 GB, like that one drive caused it to lose 30GB. I then remembered that this drive was actually an old one I had used a long time ago as my windows drive but when I got a whole new computer and didn't need the old one anymore I just popped this drive in it and now use it as a storage drive, but I never reformatted it because I figured I didn't need to and it had stuff I wanted to keep anyway. So upon looking at the drive, a Windows folder is still present on it and it has around 30GB of data in it. Not sure if just a coincidence, but could that be a reason to why my C just loses 30 GB randomly? Like maybe the drive is moving data over to my C? What has been your experience with using an old windows drive as just storage, without the reformatting?

Edit: Upon more research I came upon System Swap (or I guess the virtual memory) that the hard disk puts aside for all drives, and it just so happens to be 32GB. Could that have been the problem all along? Like it didn't have enough space to allocate on C so the drives didn't show up, but unplugging one let it have room? The way I thought about is I originally have 60GB, and each drive uses 30, so by having both plugged in, the C drive went to 1GB and possibly had an error causing neither drives to show up. Unplugging one though meant I save 30GB, resulting in what I saw. And then before plugging the drive back in I got to 90GB, which then went back to 60 after plugging in the other drive.. That make any sense? And if so is it safe to lower the allocation, especially since I got 32GB of RAM....... Edit 2: Just realized the amount of allocated space it set automatically is the same as the amount of RAM my PC has.

Sorry for the long wall of text.