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Hi, my resonably new Dell lapton came with the HD partitioned. C: seems to contain the OS (vista) and all progs and files. D: is called "recovery" and I assume is some kind of shadow that the dell utilities can use to put the machine back to defaults should it b***** up.
My problem is that I keep getting a message saying the drive is full and asking me to delete some files. I can't see any of my files on the drive and am reluctant to delete any of the others.
It seems to be fairly small, 10g (C: is 80g and only half full). Can I incrase the size of D: at the expense of C: and would you advise it? if not any other solution/
Dick
ps D: is seriously full (99.9%)
______________________________________________________________ Powys, Paradwys Cymru
"Rules are for the guidance of wise men and the obedience of fools." Douglas Bader CBE
I am not one of those, but I do know that without special software you can't alter the size of a partition without totally destroying its entire contents.
It can be done, but to be sure you are safe you would be wise to clone an image (onto another storage medium) of the contents of both partitions first, then restore them after formatting and re-partitioning your HDD.
I think it's far more likely that you are using the wrong partition for storing your files. All your day to day activity should be stored in the C: drive . . . but it sounds to me as if it's going to the D: instead.
Hope this helps a bit.
Dave
Last edited by Zebedee on Wed Jul 15, 2009 10:30 am; edited 2 times in total
Partition magic is what I use and you can do it on the fly although they recommend you back up.
Perhaps you may want to consider an external drive which not only you can backup to but move stuff off to leave your drive C with some decent space.
If the space left is not contiguous, and you have little of it, you PC will slow down to a halt as it needs space for when your physical memory runs out.
I would seriously suggest staying right away from trying to adjust the size of it, even with specialist software the implications will come back to haunt you in the future.
I cannot believe Dell would have left the allocated space at 99.9% full and I would suggest that perhaps something you installed or maybe a windows update of some description has chosen to use the D:\ to berry some temporary files or install to a directory on that partition and hence making it now full.
Have a trawl through and see if that is what has happened, you should also have the restore files under c:\dell c:\restore c:\I386 as dell tend to put them on twice for different reasons.
Yep... Read your post again and Tinyk is absolutely spot on. Either trash something you don't need or think about disabling the warning. Possibly defrag may gain you a small bit just enough to avoid the warning.
Hi, my resonably new Dell lapton came with the HD partitioned. C: seems to contain the OS (vista) and all progs and files. D: is called "recovery" and I assume is some kind of shadow that the dell utilities can use to put the machine back to defaults should it b***** up.
My problem is that I keep getting a message saying the drive is full and asking me to delete some files. I can't see any of my files on the drive and am reluctant to delete any of the others.
It seems to be fairly small, 10g (C: is 80g and only half full). <snip>
My Dell XPS has a similar set up, but the D: drive is 14.9Gb with 8.97Gb free. By my shonky calculations this means I am using 6Gb.
I have looked through briefly and haven't found any files created more recently than April.
I think you should have another look at the files on the D: drive and check for files created recently.
If something is filling up the drive then making more space will only put off resolving the problem as it will fill up again.
Vista can resize partitions - you shouldn't need 3rd party tools.
I have shrunk my C: drive to free off space for a Linux installation.
I suggest you contact Dell support and also trawl the Dell support fora because your problem is probably Dell-specific.
Hope this helps
LGC
P.S. if the drive is full and the system is complaining then perhaps something is trying to write to the drive - any clues in the error message? What programs are running when you get the warning?
Hi, my resonably new Dell lapton came with the HD partitioned. C: seems to contain the OS (vista) and all progs and files. D: is called "recovery" and I assume is some kind of shadow that the dell utilities can use to put the machine back to defaults should it b***** up.
My problem is that I keep getting a message saying the drive is full and asking me to delete some files. I can't see any of my files on the drive and am reluctant to delete any of the others.
It seems to be fairly small, 10g (C: is 80g and only half full). Can I incrase the size of D: at the expense of C: and would you advise it? if not any other solution/
Dick
ps D: is seriously full (99.9%)
Hi Dick
The best software for this would be acronis disk director, it's very good but could probably work out expensive just to use it once, however it will allow you to shrink the c drive and expand the d drive accordingly, i would recommend against using relatively unknown free software for this. this type of manipulation used to be very dangerous as it was done autonomously from the os etc, so even if the procedure was successful further problems could occur, for example the os may expect certain system files to be in a specific location, and these could have been moved. acronis as an example is developed against the .net middleware and so is managed code, meaning that everything is 'supervised', controlled by the middleware and ultimately the os, older software would try to interact with the hardware in a more direct manner, hence problems would occur, managed code can't do that.
I'm absolutely staggered that manufacturers are dishing out systems like this, i understand that recovery partitions are often used due to licensing restrictions, this way they don't give you a copy of the os on disc etc, but if they are going to do it this way, it should be a partition that is viewable to the bios and not the users os, it definately should not use a file system supported by the os, or be assigned a drive letter making it accessible by the user and/or the os and applications, a recovery partition should not be interacted with unless a restore is needed, which wouldn't be done by the os. further more; why do they provide home users with one very large c drive, this is perfect practice for a business environment where users can't write to the c drive and therefore save data to the network where it is protected etc, however home users (not trying to sound condescending) should be encouraged to keep data files seperate from the system partition, so often users loose valuable data simply because the file system or files have become corrupt on the system drive, if data is on a seperate partition, you can re-install the os or use the recovery mechanism, and all data files are nicely preserved on the data partition instead of being wiped out or lost. there are other benefits as well, but this alone makes it worthwhile.
sorry for the rant but i hate the way manufacturers often force users into bad practices just because it's easier or slightly cheaper.
Hi thankyou for all of your suggestions. I think I've sussed it. As suggested I explored D:, I had done it before but had not recognised any file or folder names that I had created so was reluctant to delete anything.
There was a folder (last modified last week) that contained 6g plus. Vista automatic backup had been configured to back up to D: once a week. This is not something I did so laptop must have come so configured.
Deleted this folder, changed backup settings to go to ext. HD that I have plugged in at home (ironically to manually backup my files). We are flying again and I have a smile on my face.
Dick
ps. Rather glad that it was not set to go to C: or presumably at some stage it would have seized the OS through lack of space if not discovered. I agree lbgzone not a good design!
______________________________________________________________ Powys, Paradwys Cymru
"Rules are for the guidance of wise men and the obedience of fools." Douglas Bader CBE
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