Please Educate Me....

[Wingco1]

According to Belarc Advisor, my Toshiba Laptop HDD details are: "c: (NTFS on drive 0) 35.99 GB 15.64 GB free" (which is a Hitachi Travelstar 60gig) which in this day and age seems rather small, and over half full.
I often read of people frequently 'formatting and reinstalling' to clean out the rubbish. I have never formatted a HDD, so have some questions;

1. It appears that XP is installed on the C: drive, Windows and System folders are there, there doesn't appear to be a hidden partition. The product key is on a sticker on the lappy's base. I don't remember getting an XP disc, but have one supplied with another system.

2. If I decide to reformat etc., can I use the other XP disc and the lappy's product key?.

3. How do I save and reinstall all the necessary drivers?.

4. I understand how to make backups of the files/folders I want to keep onto DVD.

5. Is there an idiots guide to formatting?.

[Gary]

You can claim alot of space back with running a free tool called CCleaner http://www.ccleaner.com/download/builds download the slim build, have a read through the instructions its really easy then run it, you will be surprised how much space you may get back Unless you have a image of your laptop or a windows disk you cant do it, some laptops have a hidden part of the drive with an image on

[Glenn]

60Gb will be the unformatted size of the drive, formatting it will reduce the available space, in this case approx 8Gb.

Do you have a version of XP, if so what version and what version is the COA sticker for?

Assuming you have the correct version of XP for the key, boot from the CD it will come to an install screen asking where you want to install it, delete the original partition and do a quick format. Now install to your C drive, if your laptop has a SATA drive you may need to press F6 to load the drivers for it.

As Rik says below best to get the drivers from Tosh before the laptop is rebuilt.

[Rik]

IIRC, a Windows installation formats automatically before starting. However, you would need to get hold of the mobo drivers, possibly a d/l from Tosh? Is there not some arcane key sequence at boot time to enter a recovery partition?

Personally, I would go with Gary's suggestion, start with a clean up, and then see if you feel the need to go further.

[Wingco1]

I run CCleaner on a weekly basis and everytime I uninstall a prog.

Sticker on Lappy and XP disc are both for XP Home.

Had a look on the Tosh download site, no mention of Motherboard drivers.

[Malc]

Have you tried clearing out 'All but the latest restore point', this can free up several gigs of space.

[Steve]

if C: is 35.9 GB where has the rest gone if drive is 6OGB?

Toshiba's usually come with a recovery disc which is an image of your HDD prior to delivery.

If you do a clean install of XP you must install the laptop specific Toshiba files in the correct order for the additional keyboard functions to work properly.

[Wingco1]

Have you tried clearing out 'All but the latest restore point', this can free up several gigs of space.

That's given me 4.5gigs back 

[Malc]

That's given me 4.5gigs back 

NP.

[Wingco1]

Now reads: "c: (NTFS on drive 0) 35.99 GB 20.98 GB free  

[Rik]

Are you sure you don't have a hidden recovery partition?

[Sebby]

Hidden partitions are common on a lot of notebooks.

[Wingco1]

Are you sure you don't have a hidden recovery partition?

Not 100%, but as I say there's a Windows Folder on the C: drive which contains a lot of other folders, the same as my Tower PC. I have a C: HDD, a D: DVD RAM, and if I plug a usb pen drive in it gets allocated Removable Disk E:

[Rik]

Now reads: "c: (NTFS on drive 0) 35.99 GB 20.98 GB free  

That says to me that there's about 15-17GB more somewhere on the HD, which is not getting a drive letter allocated. If you right-click My Computer, select Manage and then drive management, does that show an unallocated area on the drive?

[Sebby]

If you right-click on My Computer, select Manage, then choose Disk Management, you can see all partitions.

[Rik]

Snap.

[Wingco1]

Snap.

There's a 15.08gb Acronis SZ, and 7.29gb unallocated. So the unallocated is the hidden partition?

[Rik]

Sounds like it - that's about the right size for a recovery partition - all you need to discover is how to access it. Usually, it's something like f12 at boot.

Personally, I'm not a great fan of the Acronis SZ, I prefer to store the images outside the machine, so if you can to that, you'll get another 15GB back.

On Acer's, btw, there's an option to burn a recovery DVD from the partition and then remove the latter.

[Wingco1]

Personally, I'm not a great fan of the Acronis SZ, I prefer to store the images outside the machine, so if you can to that, you'll get another 15GB back.

That was my next question  how to get rid of the Acronis partition?.

[Rik]

TBH, I've never created one to give you an answer from personal experience, but this may be what you need.

[Steve]

Can confirm, remove the recovery zone using the acronis software, should also give you the option of allocating the free space to your primary partition

[Rik]

Thanks, Steve. 

[Wingco1]

  "c: (NTFS on drive 0) 60.01 GB 44.86 GB free"

[Rik]

Great result.

[Steve]

Similar problem with my son's laptop, his system restore was 12gb in size so managed to reclaim that back. However the drive is partitioned in two and he is reluctant to use this completely empty one,goodness knows why.

The OS is vista and as yet I have not found a way of increasing the size of the primary system partition, certainly vista's disk management tools are incapable. I have found references to Gparted but have no linux experience. I also have a Toshiba recovery disk which I presume since it is an image will be of little value.