Please help with space allocation of my drives

I am sure this is ridiculously simple but having spoken to non listening Tech Support I am even more confused please bear with me whilst I try to explain

I ought to explain I am seriously ill and my illness has affected my ability to comprehend often the simplest things, so now am embarrassed at having to post for assistance with this as the Tosh support group have made me feel like I am being a complete imbecile in even asking the question..

I have a Toshiba Satellite Pro A300 109 with 140 GB HD running Win Vista Home Premium

Laptop arrived partitioned into c drive 74.3 GB and e drive ( recovery drive) 73,2 GB

I am comfused as at purchase the advice was customer shld save data to c drive and keep e drive for receovery ONLY - of course it never dawned on me to q why my e drive needed to be so large .. Now that I am rapidy using space on my cdrive I want to use some of e drive..

I called Tosh support to ask for assistance re this , and asked if I needed to use some form of partitioning software like partition magic ..They basically said " if you have made your recov CD ( apparantly most customers dont then get into difficulties when they delete recovery files) you can use ALL of edrive and delete the recovery files "!!!!!!!

I am not completely stupid and I have heard of Backups of DVDs and CDs failing so I dont want to do that.. I told them that to which they kept saying "but you said you have your recovery CD so what is the big issue I dont see the problem.." grrrrrr

So when I finally got them to understand why I did not want to delete recovery data on e drive they said fine well in that case just save your files from hereon in to insto the edrive instead of the c drive ..

Please help me understand this -


a ) I thought it was necc to keep my files ,documents , pictures etc seperate frm the receovery data, and have seen many ref in forums of people being told they shld NOT save files to the "recovery drive" ?
b) How much space do I need realistically for the recovery drive currently is only uses a few GB ..

b) On opening the e drive this is what I see :-

x1 folder called HDDRecovery

And 1 file R08571EN.tag

d) What is the easiest thing to do here, as I would like to keep my data organised as opposed to scattered here and there

PLease can you also tell me what a .tag file is , I looked at the properties info for it and foudn teh following

Size 11bytes

Size on disk 4.00 KB

Thank you in advance for your assistance and patience

Tamba1

 

Hmm, that recovery drive, or recovery partition, being the same size as drive/partition C is strange. Normally, the recovery partition would not be nearly that large since it's purpose of to restore Windows and usually other software that was on the computer when new. So, there's no need for it to be so large.

Based on the facts you stated, you have a 160GB hard drive and half of it is allocated to the recovery partition. Again, there's no need for it to be so large.

The general idea behind a recovery partition is that the user would create, i.e. burn, a DVD from the recovery partition and then no longer needs to keep the recovery files on the hard drive and can use that space for other purposes. I suggest you do this. Just make sure you get a valid disc from the burn procedure. If it was correctly burned, you should be able to boot from it. Just test it by putting it in your DVD drive just before a shutdown and then see whether the computer recognizes it and boots from it during the next startup; of course, quit out of the recovery screens and do a normal restart since you're just testing to verify the disc is bootable. Do not delete the recovery files on the hard drive until you've verified you have a good recovery disc on DVD.

An alternative approach could be to leave the recovery files on the hard drive and reduce the size of that partition and create additional partition(s) on that free space. Any new/additional partitions will appear in Windows Explorer as drives, just as your existing E as a separate drive, even though C and E are part of one physical drive. I presume your OS is either Windows Vista or Windows 7. If so, you may able to use the Shrink Volume feature to create your new partition(s). Here's a reference: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-vista/Can-I-repartition-my-hard-disk

 

I made recovery DVDs for my new computer. If they eventually can not be used, it will not harm me. Why? Because after I have the software removed that I do not want, the software installed that I do want and windows updated, I make an image.
I use Acronis True Image. The first image I make of a computer I always burn and I spend the extra time to verify the image after it is burned. I don't want to assume it is a good image, only to discover that when I need it, I can't restore the computer from it.
After the first image, I make another image about every 3 or 4 weeks. These I put on an external hard drive. So I now have images burned and images stored on another hd. If I need to restore, I then have two options, a burned image or ae external hd image. These images are more valuable than a recovery partition located on the hd inside my computer.
If the internal hd dies, I can then use one of my images and use a new hd to restore to.

I also always make my images outside of windows. TrueImage allows you to burn a recovery CD that will run the entire program, even if windows does not boot up. I use this CD every time I want to create an image, verify an image or restore an image.

If you get imaging software, you will discover that you no longer need the recovery partition E: on your Toshiba.

Just to be clear, are you sure E is the recovery partition and not some hidden D: partition that you can not see? On most computers, the recovery partition is D:, that's why I ask.

 

Hi Usafveteran

Thank you for your posting - yes I too thought it bizarre to have such a large space allocated to the e drive.. Allthough thought I was losing the plot whhen the cust support person implied this was normal and why was I just not saving files to e drive..

Yes I DO have vista ( Vista Home Premium) and I was readng about the shrink volume feature earlier today as I stumbled across info when looking up partition magic info ..

Can you tell me what size SHOULD I set for the e drive ( assuming I only used it for the recovery files currently on there ) Sorry by that I mean obviously I need the same amount of space for the files on there as I currently have but how much extra should I leave on the edrive.. I understand from the info that I need to specify "how much I want to shrink the drive by as oposed to the size I want the drive to be..

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/resize-a-partition-for-free-in-windows-vista/

I was going to do this ( espec now you have said about how to test the recovery cds) as I was a bit anxious about reading the info here ( as I am not used to shrinking or partitioning drives)

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/wind...ows-vistas-shrink-volume-inadequacy-problems/

I guess Its a case of preparing as much as poss, backing up files, setting restore point and then just doing it

Also can you tell me if it is possible to COPY the recovery files onto an external HDD, do these files behave like normal files, or is the only way to correctly "back them up" to use the Toshiba Recovery DIsk Creator ( which is how I created my recovery disks when I bought my laptop)

Once again many thanks for your help it is truly appreciated
tamba1