"jack" <jack@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:F5320E95-F31E-4B9C-A9DD-6CFEC6267A97@microsoft.com...
> Mic, I think you may be wrong.
> I to am having trouble Freeing space on my rcovery drive. Vista explians
> to
> delete old restore points but does not tell me how. With this drive full
> my
> system is crawling.
> --
> Long days pleasent nights
>
>
> "Michael Palumbo" wrote:
>
>
>>
>>
>> "piook" <piook@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
>> news:E486890C-416D-4EE8-9301-15851A4084B7@microsoft.com...
>> > My guess is that your D drive is a recovery drive for going back to the
>> > original "Factory Settings" on your computer. So it is not intended as
>> > a
>> > place to store your Vista Backups. Furthermore, it is probably just a
>> > partition of the only "physical" hard drive in your machine (the same
>> > physical drive as your C: partition) and as such is not a good place
>> > for
>> > storing the backups anyway, since if that hard drive fails the back up
>> > will
>> > be lost.
>> >
>> > You should also read the documentation for the machine to see if you
>> > need
>> > to
>> > make a restore disk in case of a hard drive failure, since often times
>> > the
>> > d:
>> > partition is used in place of computer manufacturer's sending an
>> > install/recovery disc with your system.
>> > --
>> > piook is a long standing psuedo-name that resulted from a typo on the
>> > old
>> > computer game "Where in the USA IS Carmen Sandiego", and it stuck.
>> >
>> >
>>
>> I'm going to confirm your guess, Piook.
>>
>> This is the recovery drive to do a system restore to factory new.
>>
>> IT SHOULD NOT BE DELETED, FORMATTED, OR MESSED WITH IN ANY WAY! Unless
>> of
>> course you have full install disks for all the software that came with
>> your
>> system. :-)
>>
>> Dell will provide complete disks, but they usually expect you to pay for
>> them, so make the recovery disks that it should be bugging you to make
>> and
>> leave the D: drive alone.
>>
>> In the past Dell always marked this drive as hidden but for some reason
>> on
>> the Vista pre-loads they haven't.
>>
>> Mic
>>
Is it a Dell?
If it is, this IS the recovery drive.
This is a partition that has a compressed image of the C: drive in its
original, from the factory, setup. OS, drivers, software, etc.
If your system is 'crawling' there is something else causing it. A
non-system partition should have no effect on your system performance as
long as there is plenty of space for the swap file on your primary
partition.
Dell has been using this method of recovery for quite some time, on XP
systems the partition is hidden.
I have recently worked on a few Dell systems (Vista pre-installed) adding
RAM, simple setup, etc. and noted on each of the three machines I worked on
there was a D: partition present, and it was almost full, and it did indeed
contain the recovery information.
http://www.dellcommunity.com/support...d=80290#M30298
Have a look at the above post on the Dell forums, it confirms what myself,
and piook have both said about the D: partition on Vista loaded Dell
computers.
Thankfully, it also explains WHY the partition is visible
Mic