Okay, the manual that came with my laptop lied to me. It said that if I perform a full system recover but I format both drives, not just C, then it won't ever be able to run the recover thing again, unless I had previously burned recover CD-s. So I figured what this means is that the sector on the hard drive which stores all the recovery stuff would get deleted and free up HD space. So I created recovery CD-R's and went ahead with the recover. And nothing happened! I didn't gain anymore HD space and the recover program still works perfectly fine right off the hard drive without needing the recover CD's. wth?? I want to get rid of the stupid thing so that it stops hogging my HD space! Any ideas how to accomplish that?
hey DaRuSsIaMaN are you talking about the system restore feature, which you want to disable or is this something different?
No, it's not the Windows system restore. It's like a backup disc that was instead put onto the hard drive by the laptop maker. When u buy a non-OEM computer, the OS and some programs are already installed on it, right? Well, if, say, I got a bunch of viruses and wanted to completely reformat and reinstall everything, I would use this recover feature. (I can launch it by pressing f10 at a point during the boot process b4 windows loads) It's like those recover CD's that non-barebones computers used to come with so u could reinstall everything back to how it was fresh out of the store. Except in my case it's stored on the hard drive, not CDs. So I want to delete it off of wherever it's stored on the hard drive so that I can use that harddrive space for other things. I guess it's not that big of a deal, really... but still it'd be nice to figure out how to do it.
ah I see what you mean. So you formated the HDD but the recovery data was still there? does the recovery data appear as a partition?
Short answers: yes; no. ----- Details: It does not appear as a partition. It seriously seems as if its an "invisible" partition or something lol... I have 2 partitions: C and D. I formatted the HDD using that recover program. That is, I hit f10 during boot to bring up the program, and there I selected the option that said: “recovers both C: and D: drive.” The description of that option was: “Formats both C: and D: drive. Then restores the contents of your hard disk to its original state in C: drive.” I have already tried this twice. Soo ... apparently the recover data is still here, since I can keep launching the program by hitting f10 and I can keep recovering the computer to its original state as many times as I like. It doesn’t really make sense anyway: how could the program reinstall everything and delete itself at the same time if it really were to format the entire HDD? Furthermore. In the original state the C: drive has about 4-4.5 Gigs used up. Seems reasonable enough: WinXP plus some set of standard software should take up about that much, right? Drive D: comes completely empty. Interestingly, according to the hardware specs of my laptop, I'm supposed to have a 60Gig HDD. However, the c: & d: drives only add up to exactly 51 (C: is 29.3gig and D: is 21.7). So what the hell? Is this recover data taking up the extra 9gig in some invisible partition?? I asked my friend who also has a laptop about this, and he has a similar situation: out of his 100gig HDD he can only use like 85, he says, and his laptop also features a recover system like mine.
You never get the full amount of space in any HDD. So if its 40GB, you will get around 37GB. For you recovery, there might be the possiblity of having another drive into your computer, which is holding all the recovery files. Try replacing your HDD with another HDD and see if you still can recover data on it. Did you ask your retailer that what if that HDD gone cookoo? How will I recover my data?
EDIT: Hmm well I just went into the BIOS and it definitely tells me I only have 1 HDD and 1 DVD/CDRW, that's it. On my friend's PC the recovery data iappears to be stored in a partition which he can't access, but it shows up when u go into his "My Computer". On mine, however, it's just C and D. Nothing else. So where the hell is it?
