# Recovery Drive D is Red - almost full



## bmillunzi (Dec 20, 2007)

I am using the new Vista Ultima on an HP m8150n quad core computer. Things have been mostly just fine. Recently however, my recovery drive D is showing as RED, 734mb free out of 9.23 gig. My main drive C has 190gig free out of 288gig. I have a drive E also, that has 276gig free out of 298gig. On the side of my machine HP put a sticker indicating that the machine has a 640gig hard drive.
Is my hard drive partitioned to drive C,D and E?
I do use the automatic backup for files only and I have set this to be backed up to drive E. The backup has been performing just fine on Sunday nights.
My main questions are 
1. Why is my recovery drive D filling up?
2. Is microsoft's automatic updates filling it up?
3. What should I do at this point, obviously I will make a external recovery disc, but is my system about to crash when the recovery drive gets completely full?

Sorry for being so long winded, I truly appreciate any help.

Signed, I think I'm about to hit a MSWall.
Thank you.


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## Rich-M (May 3, 2006)

Actually unless you tell us what is there on "D", how can we tell you without seeing your pc?
I would imagine there is a restore partition and the System Restore from Windows also, but there has to be something else. I suggest you go into Control panel, Folder Options, View and uncheck all the "hide files and folders as there should be 3 of them, then go back and look at "D" and tell us what you see.


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## bmillunzi (Dec 20, 2007)

Rich-M,
thank you for the quick reply.
I did what you suggested.
I went to the recovery drive d, change the folder view option to show hidden files. But all I still get is the following statement from hp

Recovery Partition
Warning!

This area of your hard drive
(or partition) contains files used
for your PC Recovery.

Do not delete or alter these files.

Any change to this partition could
prevent any recovery later.

Explorer only displays this text when I try to look at this folder.
I went back to check and see if hidden files were selected to display and it was set to show hidden files. Is this hp specific or Vista?
Thank you very much for working with me on this.
Please help.
Bob


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## Rich-M (May 3, 2006)

If you right click the drive and choose "Explore" what do you see. You also should be able to right click the restore partition and determine size by choosing "Properties" however those are generally under 1 gb.


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## bmillunzi (Dec 20, 2007)

Rich-M, when I right click and choose explore, it shows under the name column "Recovery" Date Modified "6-18-2007" Type "File" Size - shows up blank.
As far as right-clicking over the restore partion, I only see a recovery drive d. when I righ click over this and properties I see 9.23gig with only 734mb free.
I apologize if I am not answering this part right, I don't know where to find the restore the partion, I thought this was the recovery drive. Or maybe you meant I would be able to see this once I right clicked and explored the recovery drive.
I greatly appreciate your patience.


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## Noyb (May 25, 2005)

1. Why is my recovery drive D filling up? ... *Its NOT .. It came full*
2. Is microsoft's automatic updates filling it up? ... *NO*
3. but is my system about to crash when the recovery drive gets completely full? ... *NO*

Don't mess with the HP recovery Partition and .. *Make your Recovery DVDs .. NOW*
And use a good quality DVD


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## bmillunzi (Dec 20, 2007)

Noyb,
thank you for the reply.
I may be wrong, but I don't remember it full when i bought the machine.
Sorry for questioning, but is it really true that when you buy a vista machine the partition will be full already?
Thank you for your patience.


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## Noyb (May 25, 2005)

All HP (and other) Recovery Partitions are almost full .. Don't worry about it.
This is the same as having a recovery DVD .. it doesn't fill up either.
It's also used to make your recovery DVDs .. or you can recover a HP supplied application from it as well.
Don't even try to defrag it.

Do you get any other error messages ??
I use Sony DVDs


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## Noyb (May 25, 2005)

PS .. I should have said .. Sony DVD*+*R (16x) .. not DVD-R


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## mrss (Jun 13, 2007)

I have an HP laptop and my D-drive shows red too in Explorer. Mine had the volume label HP_RECOVERY. You can't normally write to it. The HP/windows backup utility has a weakness though where you could have chosen "D" instead of "E" in error and written to it. If you had done that though, it would show full. So ignore the red and be happy, unless the free space starts to shrink. Then something is wrong.

My suggestion is that you 
1) Make the recovery CD's if you have not done so. You can only do it once.
2) Buy an external USB drive. Put your backups there. When the big drive fails in your HP, you will lose everything. Relative to PC's. external drives are cheap these days. 
3) For even better recovery, get a backup program that can write an image of your C-drive. Then you can get everything back at once. The D-drive recovery only gets you back to when the PC was new, minus your app's, email, docuents, etc. Noyb and I are fans of Acronis True Image.


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## Noyb (May 25, 2005)

mrss said:


> Noyb and I are fans of Acronis True Image ... Buy an external USB drive


:up: Your HP uses SATA hard drives.

May I suggest getting these enclosures ..
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817424001
Then install a SATA HD ... something like ...
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136074
And while at Newegg .. get ...
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...cription=acronis+true+image&name=Acronis,+Inc.


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