Why is my "D" drive red and almost full?

It’s an issue if you plan to store any more on it. So I suppose that’s a “yes”, because that’s what we have disk drives for, no?

I’m guessing that you have a single hard disk partitioned into C:\ and D:\ drives. (It’s how my laptop hard drive is configured, and I suppose it’s pretty typical.) My C:\ partition is much smaller than D:\, and meant for Windows system files and executable programs, as a rule.

The D:\ drive is my ‘Data’ drive. It’s a much larger partition, but it also gets closer to being filled (not ‘full’, like yours is, but ‘fuller’ than C:\). When it gets to 70 – 75% full, then I start looking for “old and unused” files, especially the larger ones, and removing them to archival storage on my backup drive (you do make regular backups, right?) and letting them lie there. (And I also make an additional backup elsewhere, so that I don’t have “just one copy” of important files.)

And I never store much ‘media’ on my D:\ drive. Videos, music files and large presentation files are always stored off the laptop.

@CyanoticWasp I hardly have any documents on my computer. I have some pictures but not many. I can not figure it out.

In that case, I’d recommend downloading and running Tree Size on the drive to see where the majority of the space is being used, and take it from there.

What is the total size of the D drive?

On my computers, the D: drive is usually my optical drive, and it generally reads 0 MB free space available and thus shows a red bar when I view the free space.

On an older computer i had, D: was the partition where I had my WinXP swap file. As that partition was only ~1.5GB and I used most of it for a fixed-size swap space, it was also red and mostly full.

Without knowing more about how you set your laptop up, I can’t be certain that it’s nothing to worry about (I’ve seen to many strange and/or stupid things in my day) but I can think of a few ways that it could be no big deal so I wouldn’t panic.

@CyanoticWasp
Well the Tree Size Program says that 73.8 % of the D drive disc space is “preload”. What the heck does that mean?

Defragment your computer. also, use disk cleanup. you can eliminate all the trash and this will you give you a much faster computer. also, your computer makes duplicate files, in some circumstances. duplicate files are not necessary and they require a lot of disk space. locate and run file duplication and delete most all ot them.

D drives on most major manufacturer laptops (HP, E-Machines, Acer, etc) are often a secondary partition of the primary hard drive that contains a complete POS (Point of Sale) backup system for emergencies. Hence the reason for it being always full, as it is usually only slightly larger than what it needs to be to store all the files and programs needed.

@jerv Could he somehow fix this issue by right clicking my computer and clicking manage? Then modifying the partitions so that there is space?

@Mr_Grimm I believe so.