Vista - Recovery Drive

Not sure where to post and not really finding the answer when searching so ..
As you can see in the image my recovery has turned red and is practically full, but I cant seem to access it.
Options are?

Hello RePete,

Welcome to Vista Forums!

The color change you noticed is perfectly normal when the drive approaches its full capacity (in percent of total disk memory) on your Vista machine; I've got two that are both red on my machine but still have around 10GB left on each.

In order to free up some space on your drives, consider burning your media to cd's or dvd-r's; the first can hold about 800 MB of data, and the latter 4.3 GB. DVD Dual Layer discs are expensive, but can hold up to 8.5 GB (retail value must be adjusted because they count their units "conveniently" to make it appear they have more room than they actually do). You can probably find DL's at Sams Club for around $50 for a 50 case of Verbatims; that's the best deal I've found so far.

Other options are to buy an external hdd, like a Western Digital or a Seagate. These can be purchased for around $100 and can hold anywhere from 250 to 500 GB of data.

One more option, although not my favorite, is to compress (archive) your data with a program like winrar to make it take up less room; these programs use algorithms to shrink your files, although you must unpack them whenever you want to access them later on. This process can take a considerable amount of time, especially for larger files. It is the one free option I can think of at the moment, though.

Hope that helps,
Ben

Hope you haven't adding or removing anything from that partition (D, which as its name states is the recovery partition. If you didn't receive or create recovery disks with the computer, you mess with that and you will have to order the disks from HP if you ever need to restore/re-install Windows. That partition being full (or near full) is also completely normal as HP (and any other system manufacturer that uses recovery partitions) only make the partition big enough to store the necessary files to restore the system.

Best advice regarding that partition, leave it alone.