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Hi,
Hoping the hive mind of STW can help.
I'm selling miss Sids old Toshiba laptop to a colleague at work. It's a fairly basic but solid jobbie with 1.5GB ram, celeron PCU and 2 x 30 GB hard drives (or might be one drive partitioned two ways).
So as I understood it the HD recovery disc would wipe the hard drive and then re-install the operating system. All good me thinks so once it had re-installed I spent best part of 3 days downloading all the bloody updates for Vista. By the end of the process C drive only had 5 GB free from 30 GB. I scrounged 3 more GB but can't for the life of me work out why after a clean install I've such little space left on C drive.
I've tried searching for large files and not much showing, only 3 > 100mb. I tried looking at the shadow drive and that is under 2 GB. Can't find any restore points either.
Does anyone have suggestions as to where to look next or why C drive is so full? I can't really give it to my workmate until I sort this out.
Delete partitions and do a complete fresh install. You will need a proper vista disc 32 or 64 bit depending on what your key corresponds to.
If it's a laptop it's unlikely to have two hard drive, not impossible but unlikely, so it's a single partitioned drive.
Off-hand as I've avoided vista like the plague I don't know how big a clean install should be - a quick search suggests it can be 18GB, also MS recommend a 40GB hdd but this doesn't mean is the smallest you can use. BUT as you've now added all the service packs it might be a different story..
I'd look at deleting the second partition and then using a disc tool to re-intergrate it with the first partition - guides & free tools are available to do this for you
Though try treesize to see where your hard drive space is going http://www.jam-software.com/freeware/index.shtml
Also maybe worth running window disc cleanup & a thrid party software like [url= http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner ]Ccleaner[/url] to confirm all your temp files are cleared
Its probably kept the original installation on the disk - have a look on the C: drive and if you have a directory called 'windows.old' then this is what has happened.
Delete partitions and do a complete fresh install. You will need a proper vista disc 32 or 64 bit depending on what your key corresponds to
Not necessarily. If it has a recovery parition you can wipe all the other partitions and do a fresh install using the recovery. As mentioned if you just re-install with the recovery it won't wipe lots of old stuff. In any case if you are selling it and bothered about personal data you should do a proper drive wipe first (no need to get all forensic - just use a simple freeware tool which writes all zeros to the whole disc).
If you want Win7 on the laptop, drop me an email.. (in profile)