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General discussion

Vista hiding part of hard drive capacity?

Feb 28, 2007 11:34AM PST

Recently bought a new HP Pavillion notebook. Bought a 160 GB drive with it, instead of standard 80 GB.

Drive came partitioned into two partitions:
C drive of 142.6 GB (+- on the point part)
D drive of 6.4 GB as recovery drive.
That adds up to about 149 GB, not 160 GB

I"m not found of the recovery drive but I think I'm stuck with it.

Called HP tech support (twice), and was told that the roughly 11 GB of missing drive space is being used by Vista for system crash protection. First tech had really bad English tried to sell me an external hard drive. Second tech didn't speak really good English either, so not sure he understood. Both babbled on about the recovery portion of the hard drive.

Was HP blowing smoke? Did they short me by 11 GB of capicity? Or is that normal and the tech couldn't explain what was actually happening?

Discussion is locked

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A common misconception
Feb 28, 2007 7:32PM PST

The 160 gb is not gigabyte in the common sense, but 160 000 000 000 bytes, which is 149 real gigabyte (by multiplying by 1024 three times). This is the case with all the harddrives you can buy.

There is nothing wrong here, and its not the fault of vista.
HP was indeed telling you something wrong.

It is true that additional space is used for "crash protection" if you want to call it that. Some space is used for recovery files. Every time you change something mayor on your system (installing/changing drivers or software) a backup is made, so if your system does not work well anymore you can recover to the old state that was running smoothly.
You can configure how much data (at a maximum) is used for this backup information. Which gives you a bit more space for your own data, but reduces the amount of backup data (so if you reduce this amount, some backup points made in the past will be lost).

Hope this helps!

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Re: a common misconception / Vista hiding part of HD
Feb 28, 2007 8:04PM PST

Thanks for the explanation.

This is the first really large hard drive I've had so the numbers difference really stood out. It wasn't so bad on my old 20 Gig drives.

Really wish HP tech's support had been able to clear it up as succienctly as you had.

I'll read up on the crash restore points. I found them in the help files, but didn't dive to deep when it didn't apply to what I was looking for.

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also make up disc
Feb 28, 2007 9:35PM PST

I also bought a new hp notebook, and was upset to learn they stole part of my hard drive "for my protection" but there is an easy fix for some of that, In your recovery manager, there is an option to copy all the vista and hp files to disc ( makes a disc like you used to get when you bought a computer, windows + all the drivers and programs for your computer), then gives you the option to delete that on drive "D", saves you some space. I made the disc but have not deleted it yet, but good to know the space is there if i need it.

Dave

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re: also make up disk
Mar 1, 2007 4:20AM PST

HP tech support mentioned that I could delete the recovery data, and of course recommended against it. If things get really tight I'll do that, especailly since I bought the restore DVD.

Would be nice to know if it's possible to update the recovery copy with the Vista security patchs. I know you can do in Win 2K for network server based installs.

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A tip...
Mar 1, 2007 5:42AM PST

If you get low on space, it would be beneficial to you to buy an external hard drive to store the extra files that won't fit on your internal hard drive. By the time that 160GB hard drive is filled up, that same drive will probably be sold for half of what you paid for it today. Why not be safe and keep everything than risking not having a recovery partition? Just my thinking. Hope this helps.

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just to be clear
Mar 1, 2007 10:10PM PST

juat as in XP and others, you can always have access to restore points, what I was suggesting, and what hp recommends against ( they and other manufactors are under fire for not supply the cd's anyway ) is to make a copy of the oem vista and HP files ( recovery manager allows you do this very easy, or buy them) YOU SHOULD do this even if you do not delete them, if your hard crashes, no matter where that info is at on your hard drive, you will not have access to it without the disc, and trust me, even if its under warrenty, its a big hassle to get that stuff from them, they will tell you you should of made the disc when you first got the machine. my new hp had a note in the box telling me to make them cause they would not send out disc unless i paid for them, even under warrenty.
Dave