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Hard drive space eaten up by System Restore & Recycle Bin?

Hard drive space eaten up by System Restore & Recycle Bin?

Postby phileysmiley » Wed Jul 15, 2009 12:26 am

My brand new laptop with Vista 64 is supposed to have a 320 GB HDD but only 287 is showing. Can the space for System Restore and the Recycle Bin really take up as much as 33 GB?

Can I and/or should I try to reduce the space available for SR/RB?

I always used to reduce the space available for SR on XP but I'm new to Vista 64.
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Re: Hard drive space eaten up by System Restore & Recycle Bin?

Postby Grav!ty » Wed Jul 15, 2009 1:11 am

In Disk Management (right click Computer>Manage), what size is shown in the grey square area to the left of the pictorial depiction of the drive? If the drive is 320 GB it should be showing 312.5 GB there. Changing the amount of space for system restore to use shouldn't affect that shown size at all.
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Re: Hard drive space eaten up by System Restore & Recycle Bin?

Postby phileysmiley » Wed Jul 15, 2009 2:10 am

Here is what I have:
0714disc.jpg
0714disc.jpg (61.89 KiB) Viewed 3803 times
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Re: Hard drive space eaten up by System Restore & Recycle Bin?

Postby mnemonicj » Wed Jul 15, 2009 2:17 am

Actually, a 320GB hard drive should be showing 298GB in Windows (320GB = 298GiB)

Do you have any partitions on the 320GB hard drive?

287.93 + 8.70 + 1.46 = 298.09
Last edited by mnemonicj on Wed Jul 15, 2009 2:19 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Hard drive space eaten up by System Restore & Recycle Bin?

Postby phileysmiley » Wed Jul 15, 2009 2:18 am

mnemonicj wrote:Actually, a 320GB hard drive should be showing 298GB in Windows (320GB = 298GiB)

Do you have any partitions on the 320GB hard drive?

See my attachment above.
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Re: Hard drive space eaten up by System Restore & Recycle Bin?

Postby mnemonicj » Wed Jul 15, 2009 2:21 am

phileysmiley wrote:See my attachment above.


Sorry, I couldn't see the whole picture and didn't realize I could scroll down in picture frame to see the partition sizes. Yep, 298.09GB sounds right.
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Re: Hard drive space eaten up by System Restore & Recycle Bin?

Postby phileysmiley » Wed Jul 15, 2009 2:23 am

But I only have 287.93 available. There is an empty 8.70 GB partition. This is out of the box.
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Re: Hard drive space eaten up by System Restore & Recycle Bin?

Postby mnemonicj » Wed Jul 15, 2009 2:29 am

phileysmiley wrote:But I only have 287.93 available. There is an empty 8.70 GB partition. This is out of the box.


I didn't have any other partitions when I installed Vista on my machine. I am not sure why those partitions are there, but I don't believe they are required to run Vista and with no data in those partitions, I don't see any reason to have them.

Before you go deleting partitions though, what do you mean by "out of the box"?
-New retail hard drive?
-New OEM hard drive?
-Used hard drive?
-New computer?
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Re: Hard drive space eaten up by System Restore & Recycle Bin?

Postby phileysmiley » Wed Jul 15, 2009 2:30 am

mnemonicj wrote:
phileysmiley wrote:But I only have 287.93 available. There is an empty 8.70 GB partition. This is out of the box.


I didn't have any other partitions when I installed Vista on my machine. I am not sure why those partitions are there, but I don't believe they are required to run Vista and with no data in those partitions, I don't see any reason to have them.

Before you go deleting partitions though, what do you mean by "out of the box"?
-New retail hard drive?
-New OEM hard drive?
-Used hard drive?
-New computer?

New computer.
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Re: Hard drive space eaten up by System Restore & Recycle Bin?

Postby Grav!ty » Wed Jul 15, 2009 2:32 am

mnemonicj wrote:Actually, a 320GB hard drive should be showing 298GB in Windows (320GB = 298GiB)

Do you have any partitions on the 320GB hard drive?

287.93 + 8.70 + 1.46 = 298.09


Quite right Joe...I only divided by 1024 once instead of three times. So the HDD size shown in Disk Management is correct.
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