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New Dell laptop/Vista/Hard drive space issues

post #1 of 13
10/9/07 at 11:37am
Thread Starter 
I just got my dad a Dell Vostro 1500 laptop with Windows Vista home basic on it, with 2gb of memory and 120gb hard drive. It runs great so we'll be keeping vista on it for now. When I booted it up I noticed there was a recovery partion that was about 8 gb, so I tried to delete this, and it no longer shows up on the device management, however now out of a possible 100gb space on the C drive (by going to the Computer link) there is only 89gb available. so that means 30 gigs are taken up, which seems way excessive. I know there's a certain amount of space that's reserved by the system, but is it really 30 gb? If not, how can I recover as much space as possible on the drive?
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post #2 of 13
10/9/07 at 1:52pm

Re: New Dell laptop/Vista/Hard drive space issues

No space is "reserved by the system". Your 120GB drive is NOT 120GB, it's 120 billion bytes. Manufacturers advertise hard drive space in decimal units, while computers use hard drive space in binary units.

1 billion bytes = 1,000,000,000 bytes = 10^9 bytes
1 Gigabyte = 1,073,741,824 bytes = 2^30 bytes

What this means is, if your hard drive is 120 billion bytes, it is LESS than 120 GB. Pretty deceiving practice by the manufacturers, imo.

To get your true space of the drive, multiply the number of billion bytes by 0.93132257462. This number is exactly (1000/1024)*(1000/1024)*(1000/1024). For kilobytes, only use one (1000/1024). For megabytes, use two. Since we are using gigabytes, we use all 3, and the true usable space of your drive is 120*0.93132257462, or 111 GB.

Go to the drive administration panel and see if that partition is still taking up space. It looks like you still have some space remaining to be claimed, but it's less than you originally thought.

CJ
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post #3 of 13
10/9/07 at 3:11pm

Re: New Dell laptop/Vista/Hard drive space issues

Quote:
now out of a possible 100gb space on the C drive (by going to the Computer link) there is only 89gb available. so that means 30 gigs are taken up
No, 100 - 89 is 11. That sounds "reasonable" for Vista. Sad, isn't it?

120 billion bytes (as advertised)
which equals
111 GB (as calculated)
- 8 GB deleted recovery partition
which equals
100 GB C drive (as reported)
+ 3 "missing" GB

So even though you deleted the recovery partition, that space was not added back into the C drive (which is in its own partition) since that is still only 100GB. So you have at most 3 "missing" GB, although that could be a result of rounding various numbers.

Try using the Extend Volume feature in Vista. Back up any important data first.
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post #4 of 13
10/9/07 at 3:18pm

Re: New Dell laptop/Vista/Hard drive space issues

IIRC, I think that MS recommended 70gb for Vista, so IMHO, he's doing pretty good!

Glenn
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post #5 of 13
10/9/07 at 3:46pm
Thread Starter 

Re: New Dell laptop/Vista/Hard drive space issues

Wow that's crazy.... I knew that when they advertised 120gb, its not actually 120gb, but I didn't think it'd be as much as 10gb less. I'll check into the drive admin panel and Extend volume and see what I come up with.
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post #6 of 13
10/9/07 at 4:11pm

Re: New Dell laptop/Vista/Hard drive space issues

My "160 GB" drive is 149 GB formatted, a 6.875% decrease. This leads to a 111 GB expected for a "120 GB" drive, as Christ calculated.
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post #7 of 13
10/9/07 at 11:17pm
Thread Starter 

Re: New Dell laptop/Vista/Hard drive space issues

I did the Extend volume thing, and on the Computer management menu, I have the following

111.79gb drive

partitions
86mb EISA config
99.20gb system, boot, etc
10.00gb unallocated
2.50gb primary partition


by right clicking on the 2.50gb partition, I can delete that one, but when I right click on the 10 gb one, there's not an option to delete it. So I must have deleted the backup disc, but not the partition itself, as when I go to Computer, it says only 87gb of 99.2gb is available. Is there a way to get rid of this partition?
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post #8 of 13
10/10/07 at 8:28am

Re: New Dell laptop/Vista/Hard drive space issues

You shouldn't be deleting partitions willy nilly or you may find yourself without a working computer and no recovery partition, which is the installation files in case you have to wipe and start over.
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post #9 of 13
10/10/07 at 8:43am

Re: New Dell laptop/Vista/Hard drive space issues

Quote:
No, 100 - 89 is 11
Don't forget that the system will create a page file 1.5 times the amount of physical ram. So with 2GB of ram that is likely where another 3GB of space went.

EDIT-There is likely a hibernation file about the same size in there too, so more space eaten away. With 1GB of ram on my Vista partition I have a page file of just under 1.5GB and a hibernation file of just over 1GB. It adds up quick.

Quote:
You shouldn't be deleting partitions willy nilly
Ditto. What you'll find is that if you ever have to speak to Dell for tech support (not that I wish that fate on you) one of the first things they would want to do would have been use that restore partition to fix Vista. Since that's been deleted that could send you down an ugly road. Dell makes great machines, though.

Is there some reason you feel that almost 90GB of space is somehow going to be insufficient? That's a lot of information to have sitting on a portable, not to mention droppable device.

IMO this is an "it ain't broke" moment.
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post #10 of 13
10/10/07 at 10:24am
Thread Starter 

Re: New Dell laptop/Vista/Hard drive space issues

Well the reason I deleted the backup partition is because Dell actually included discs in the box for Vista and drivers and whatnot (unlike when I bought an HP a while back which included no discs). So I felt that by deleting that partition, it frees up about 10gb of space. Now I'm sure my dad probably can live without that 10gb, so do you all think I should just do a fresh reinstall of Vista from the discs in the box?
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post #11 of 13
10/10/07 at 10:46am

Re: New Dell laptop/Vista/Hard drive space issues

Yeah, Dell is one of the better vendors about including recovery discs and even driver updates on their website.
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post #12 of 13
10/10/07 at 1:06pm

Re: New Dell laptop/Vista/Hard drive space issues

Quote:
when I right click on the 10 gb one, there's not an option to delete it
You can't delete unallocated space -- it's already empty. You should be able to extend the existing 99GB partition into that unallocated space, as long as that space is right next it. That unallocated space should now be 12.5GB -- the 10 you started with, plus the 2.5 you just deleted.
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post #13 of 13
10/11/07 at 3:55am

Re: New Dell laptop/Vista/Hard drive space issues

You're probably going to need to reformat those partitions that you wiped clean. If you reformat them to NTFS as-is they will show up as new drive letters in your computer. If you want to roll it in to your "C" drive without wiping your entire computer I believe you'd have to use PartitionMagic or something similar.
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