Full System Restore, no disc space.

[Jivemoondog]

Recently preformed a successful full system restore on my PC. Reinstalled Windows XP and all the necessary drivers and updates. Added Norton System Works and it gave me a notice that I have only 12% free disc space on the C drive. I have deleted any previous system restore points and I have removed all temp. files, yet I still have no disc space. I took a look at the disc usage graph and I cannot account for more than half of the used space. Any ideas on what might be taking up those GB?

There are maybe five small programs total on the computer now and Norton System Works takes up the most with 58MB.

[rond36]

Full System Restore???

Did you format C: before you reinstalled Win XP?

[Paul Komski]

If you want to see what is where ExplorerXP is very good (http://www.explorerxp.com/).

If you want to use the bloated and hard to remove software that Norton provides that is up to you but it does some funny things, if memory serves, with things like the recycle bin, and sequesters disk space in that sort of way.

Some specific infor about your system and you hard drive might also be useful.

[Jivemoondog]

I will use that program to take a look. I have used Norton for years and it is often a pain but I am familiar with it so I use it.

I reformatted C before re-installing Windows. My subfolders take up all my GB room, when I last looked. I will have to get more detailed info.

Thank you though.

[Heartborne]

How large a hard drive do you have?
System restore only restores system settings. It doesn't delete anything. You've problem got a ton of programs sitting in your program files folder that are no longer "installed" but that data is still there.

Norton is pretty awful though.

[Jivemoondog]

13.67 GB large and that sounds like what you are saying about the programs being gone but the data is still there might be the issue. The two largest files are the The "program" file that takes up 2.66GB and the "Windows" file that takes up 3.17GB. There are alot of programs in those files that do not appear on the add/remove list in the control panel. Should I just try to find the extra files and delete them all?

[Jivemoondog]

ok I have found the issue but cannot resolve. I have a HP Pavilion a430n Desktop which has has two partitions on it. The totoal disc space on my pc is 160 GB. The recovery partition takes up 5.23 GB and the master partition takes up 13 GB. Why does the C drive only have 13 GB available when my computer has a total of 160 GB? This is what I should have stated originally, sorry.

[Paul Komski]

Where, physically, on the drive is the recovery partition? If its at the start of the drive (as seen in Disk Management) then you could use BiNG (in my sig) or GParted (http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php)to non-destructively resize the partition - ensuring any important data is backed-up first. If you are not running at least SP1 then the maximum size for a partition would be 127GB.

It should also be possible to move/slide the recovery partition to the end of the drive (if it's the second partition on the drive) but I don't know how you initiate a system restore with your PC and without that knowledge one cant be sure that the recovery would run from the new position when needed.

[Erik]

Do you mean "Full System Recovery", as in push F11 at boot to restore the computer to a factory state? I have seen cases where Windows complains that recovery partition is low on space, but that is by design as it needs a set amount of space.

If you mean that you have a 160GB physical drive, and it somehow got split into a 12GB recovery partition and a 12GB Windows partition, the rest of the space MIA then you have a problem. My first choice would be backup anything important and try to resize partitions to utilize all of the space. What appears in Disk Manager?

[Paul Komski]

The recovery partition takes up 5.23 GB and the master partition takes up 13 GB.

As stated earlier it would be useful to know what is where. If you need help in describing this just post back.