How do I get rid of Vista recovery drive D:? - Tech Support Forums

neonblack77 · April 6th, 2007, 01:47 AM

I guess it is a cool feature but I do not use it, can I merge it with my C drive somehow? The recovery drive resides on the same hard disk, so is there a way to salvage it (6+ gig) or should I just not worry about it?

osprey4 · April 6th, 2007, 07:47 AM

How desperate are you for space that you've got to have that last 6 GB?

neonblack77 · April 7th, 2007, 03:01 AM

Well, with a GB going for less than 50 cents these days, I am not too desperate...I have close to 400GB of available space, It just bugs me to know that I have something I am not going to or can't use...plus Vista keeps telling me I need to backup etc...It's not a big deal, but I would rather it not be there....thanks in advance!

Steve R Jones · April 7th, 2007, 08:09 AM

Do you have a Vista DVD? If not, you won't ever be able to reinstall if you delete the recovery partition..

neonblack77 · April 9th, 2007, 11:26 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Steve R Jones

Do you have a Vista DVD? If not, you won't ever be able to reinstall if you delete the recovery partition..

that's good to know...someone at best buy told me that I could make my own backup to DVD and then delete the recovery partition..BS? (in fact, they offered to do it for me, for a fee

!!!)

**EvilRick** · April 9th, 2007, 11:37 PM

You should have a program in your menu that will burn your Recovery CD. It's not B.S. that's how OEMs are doing it these days. They don't have to supply the media, just a way for you to recover.

I would creat the disk and remove the partition, but that's just me. It'll consolidate your 6GB into the rest of your HDD and you'll have one big happy HDD.

Just be sure to burn/test your RecoveryCD before deleting the partition.

ruleofnike69 · April 10th, 2007, 12:41 AM

Last night I did a system recovery through a XP recovery partician that was hidden on a Dell system. The fellow brought it to me hoping I could do something for him but feeling that he was going to have to pay for a re format and a new OS. He had no discs. Had that partician been gone.....he was trapped and would most assuradly have been out some serious bucks and time. The only thing I had to do was access that hidden partician and he was home free. About two hours later he was carrying his laptop home and I was watching my favorite television show on the DLP.
My point is.......be sure to have a plan B in effect before you drop the gavel on an item that the factory deemed necessary to the system. My experience tells me that restore discs can be very handy......as long as you are good about keeping up with them.
If I had a customer asking me about removing the partician, I would advise against it. Simply because I like having that bird in the hand. To me, that is worth a whole bush full of birds. I would howerver create the back ups as well. They are a last line of attack.
The thing about vista that I don't like so far is that I have several customers who tell me they have already had to restore the system more than once. That may be because I'm in the sticks of Kentucky......or it could just be that vista has a few problems. Time will tell........lol

neonblack77 · April 10th, 2007, 01:50 AM

Thanks for the advice, but I have tried to let it do the backup and there is not enough space...I just want a back up of my operating system so in the event of a mishap I will not have to pay for a new one...btw, any valuable data goes to an external device anyway.

Luv4Dolls2 · February 25th, 2008, 03:55 PM

I've also noticed that a great deal of space is being used up by the recovery disk. I recently copied 1.6GB of pictures from my laptop to a portable hard drive and deleted the pictures from the lap top. I also uninstalled Photoshop from the laptop. Were these items also removed from the "recovery" area of Vista? I don't want or need them there anymore taking up space because I would never try to recover them in the event that my computer crashed or I had problems.

Elizabeth

osprey4 · March 3rd, 2008, 08:19 AM

Elizabeth:

These recovery partitions do not actively track and back up changes to your hard drive. They're for restoring your OS image should Vista become corrupted. So to answer your question, no, your pictures are not also stored on the recovery partition.

The flip side, of course, is that you need to actively maintain back-ups of important files yourself. So your strategy of copying files to the external drive, then deleting them from the laptop is not good. What if your external hard drive failed? You must maintain important files in two places at all times. For example, you could make permanent archive copies onto recordable media, such as a CD-R or DVD±R.