Recovery VS Recovery discs

Question

Hi everbody, I have one Dell Inspiron 9400E and I have both things, 2 discs one of drivers and utilities and other from the Windows Vista from Dell, and in the same time I have the RECOVERY D: .I cant format this partition ? for this is anoying me 10gb I want this space for another stuff. Other ask is the discs contanining the same stuff of this partition have ? Other one it´s I want to make new partition on my disk, and the Vista Basic doesn´t suport partition magic, the best way for I make my new partitions ? I read about the Mananger of Windows to do partition its safe ? Please help on this. Thank´s Richard

richardlisboa · Answer

Yeah, I have the disks, and have only 80GB in my laptop, I dont have another computers, and no desktops. I really want more space, its the same data have inside the DVDS ? And please what program I can use to make new partitions on my harddrive?

russell_314 · Answer

You can delete the partition with the Windows Disk manager but you won't be able to merge the free space with 'C'.  I'm just curious but are you low on disk space or have a really small hard drive?  Most laptop computers now have 80+ GB hard drives so 10 GB's is a drop in the bucket.  If you're not hurting for space keep the recovery partition because it makes the long and tedious task of installing Windows last about 5 minutes.

russell_314 · Answer

richardlisboa wrote: Yeah, I have the disks, and have only 80GB in my laptop, I dont have another computers, and no desktops. I really want more space, its the same data have inside the DVDS ? And please what program I can use to make new partitions on my harddrive? I found this program that works with Vista.  If you search I'm sure you can find others out there but make sure they work with Vista.  Installing Windows from the disc's is the same but just takes much longer.   I will again try to discourage you from deleting the recovery partition since it is a royal pain in my opinion to install Windows from a CD/DVD then do all the driver installs etc.  I wish I had one on my new computer. :P

Naba1577 · Answer

Well, I received my Inspiron 9400 notebook just a month back. The system description said the HDD will be of 120GB (117GB to be precise). But when I checked it for the first time, I saw the partition C is of 99.7Gb & D (recovery) is of 10GB. Where is the rest gone? And 10GB in 120GB is not a drop in the bucket, sorry. I was wondering if I write the files in that partition to a DVD, will that work? I mean to say, with that DVD can I recover the system from any error? I understand it will take a bit of more time. But you see if it takes 15mins from DVD instead of 5 mins from HDD, it is acceptable for me. But if it takes hours then I would need to think again. What do you say?

russell_314 · Answer

Naba1577 wrote:
Well, I received my Inspiron 9400 notebook just a month back. The system description said the HDD will be of 120GB (117GB to be precise). But when I checked it for the first time, I saw the partition C is of 99.7Gb & D (recovery) is of 10GB. Where is the rest gone? And 10GB in 120GB is not a drop in the bucket, sorry. I was wondering if I write the files in that partition to a DVD, will that work? I mean to say, with that DVD can I recover the system from any error? I understand it will take a bit of more time. But you see if it takes 15mins from DVD instead of 5 mins from HDD, it is acceptable for me. But if it takes hours then I would need to think again. What do you say?

120 GB's should be 114.4 GB so I'm not sure where that 4.7 GB's went.. I know Dell also installs a hardware diagnostic partition but that's very small. Look under disk management and it will show any hidden partitions.

No you can't save your Dell Restore image to DVD. Some backup programs will allow you to burn an image to DVD but the Dell one will not. I believe Norton Ghost will let you but I'm not sure.

To me using 10 GB's of hard drive space for a backup partition is worth not spending over an hour installing Windows from a CD then installing the drivers, updates etc.

If you're already worried about 10 GB's on a month old laptop then you might have ordered a smaller hard drive than you needed. I did this with my first laptop. Other than replacing it with a larger hard drive one solution would be to buy an external USB hard drive to store your extra files that won't fit.

Windows General

Recovery VS Recovery discs

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