3 Windows Folders

I have had a few blue screen crashes over the years which ended up by me having to re-instal xp resulting in me having 3 windows folders.
C/:windows Oct 2008 contains 3.37 gb
C/:windows0 Feb 2006 contains 7.85 gb
C/:windowsX Nov 2008 contains 7.29 gb
When I open these in separate windows using win explorer, and line them up alongside each other, the contents appear to be identical.
My question is, how best to remove/delete the contents of the "windows" and the "windows0" folder, which would free up 11 gb of space on my HD.
I should add that all three show up at boot up, and I choose "WindowsX" to boot up from as it's from the latest "Recovery", and because the others don't work anyway!!
Any tips welcome.

 

did u try deleting the windows0 and windows folder and just keeping the windowsx? although the huge siz of 7gb doesnt really make sence... but anyway , you can do these steps:

delete both un-needed windows folders, go to c: , open boot.ini in notepad, remove the un-needed lines (or in the system properties make the waiting period for 1 second and by feulat choosing windows x) , this should solve it, each windows should start up using its own folder, they shouldnt be using each other's resources

but to be on the safe side, do an image of your hard drive (to recover in case smthn bad happens), always always keep your options open and solutions ready for the "worst case scenario"

you can do an image using Symantec Ghost or any other software that does the trick for you.

Hope it helped

Cheers
WK

 

in the future, when you reinstall, make sure you format the hard drive (everything gets deleted) to avoid this happening again. And also, you should try a repair installation, so it will rewrite over the existing installation, rather than making a new one.

 

If you can boot up okay now, Back everything up,
Format the drive,
Clean install.
this will be the easiest and also giveyou the most space back.

 

Thanks, but thought that the repair installs that I used in the past would do same job, but obviously not.
Is there a definitive step by step guide that you could recommend?? also must I have an external drive to save the backup to, or could I write it to a cd??
Incidentally there is no panic here as everything functions perfectly, and I have adequate space on the HD, but I started this query because when I discovered the 3 Windows folders were taking up such a lot of space, I was keen to find a simple solution, but obviously there is none!!

 

You could back up on to CD, so then you have a harder copy.