HP Recovery Partition Troubles

Hello, and thanks in advanced.

I'm running an HP Pavilion Media Center PC with Windows Vista. My computer came with a recovery partition of the hard drive. My current problem arose after recently recieving a prompt from the HP Total Care Advisor to do a back up. I let it go ahead and do the back up, but it failed in mid process because the partition is full, and now I keep getting pop ups to clean up the drive (but there is nothing to clean up when I click on the pop up) and when I go into the partition all I get are a bunch of zipped backup files and a catalogue that it won't give me permission to open.

Any suggestions? I'm not particularily keen on wiping my Recovery partition, and while I usually don't consider myself this inept at computer related problems, that's sort of how I'm feeling at the moment...

 

It seems to me that if you're being told that the drive doesn't have enough space, then you need to clear out some junk. Run CCleaner (a free download here http://www.majorgeeks.com/CCleaner_Slim_No_Toolbar_d4191.html) and use the default settings. If you're running a Norton product, it can end up with a quarantine folder so freekin' huge that deleting it may not even be possible (I've seen this 2 or 3 times). I've had to delete it from a remote environment (like from the Recovery Console or a PECD) and it took over 2 hours for it to delete. WOW! That can definitely cause problems. Uninstall any software that you don't use. Many PCs have up to 6 or 7 different Java Runtime files installed; at over 120mb each, this can be a space hog. Remove them all, then download and install the newest one available from www.java.com (if you need it). There's lots of things you can do to free up space. Here's some good info on general maintenance http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=106650

 

Thank you for the response, but that isn't quite the problem. I've already done tonnes of house cleaning, and my hard drive has over 250 gb free yet, it is the recovery partition that is full.

I was prompted to do a backup, so I did, but part way through the recovery partition became full and the backup aborted. So now I have a full recovery partition, with whatever came in there from the factory, and half of my system backed up to it... I'm not particularily keen on going in there and deleting whatever it was that came in there to begin with, and when I explore the partition I find:

1 folder with my system name (1GB - Contains a folder called backup set, which itself contains a folder called catalogues which I cannot access, and another folder with even more zipped folders inside of it)

1 item [the icon appears to be a purple hard drive] called RECOVERY (185kb - according to properties it containes 2 files)

1 item called BDWizReg.log (4kb)

1 item called MediaID.bin (4kb)

This has completely filled an 8.9GB partition.


I'm not sure what, if anything, I should clean up to be able to do a proper backup, and I'm not keen on just wiping it clean. that in addition to the general annoyance of windows alerting me every 15 seconds that I have low disk space...

 

HP Notebook PCs - Low Disk Space Error Appears During or After Backup

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/...80&lc=en&cc=hk&dlc=en&product=3411859&lang=en

 

Thank you very much, that pretty well answered all of my questions.

I guess I should probably look a little harder next time rolleyes

Thank you though...

 

Your Welcome