[Niles]

Hopefully I am posting this in the right forum!

I recently upgraded from XP to Vista on a Dell D820 and everything works fine. However the hard drive is almost full and I wanted to empty everything as part of the upgrade, so I had a clean hard drive but when I try to format the drive it says I can't as Windows is on the drive.

I have tried manually deleting files but although the hard drive is almost full I have only managed to find about 15gb of files and folders. Although Vista is taking up about 10.5 gb something on the machine is using up the rest of the 80gb drive.

Can anyone suggest how I can wipe this drive or find the missing folders?

Any help gratefully received.

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Reboot from your Vista CD and do a clean install, (which will delete everything currently on the hard drive).

[SpywareDr]

Reboot from your Vista CD and do a clean install, (which will delete everything currently on the hard drive).

[rshaffer61]

You can go to HERE to read the tutorial by one of the members here on how to do a Fresh Install or Repair Installation of you OS.

[Niles]

Thanks for the replies. Having read the tutorial the trick I missed was in not seeing the "drive options advanced" button. Now re-installing and hopefully everything will be fine.

Thanks again

[rshaffer61]

Let us know how it all works out. Good luck and we'll continue to monitor this topic for your results.

[Niles]

Yes - everything went smoothly and I now have a nice clean drive free of clutter (for now)!

Thanks again for the replies.

[rshaffer61]

Congratulations. for a successful resolution for your issue.

You are very welcome. I'm glad we could help and if there is anything else we can do to help please feel free to ask. I appreciate that you allowed us to assist you with your issue and for your patience.
Thank you for choosing GeeksToGo for help.

[MilesAhead]

Next time look for a folder named Windows.old. If you did a Custom install to do the upgrade, it gathers up all the stuff under Program Files and Windows and stuffs it into that folder. When you don't need it anymore, most often you can kill it off using the Disk Cleanup in Accessories in the Start Menu. When I custom installed Windows Seven over Vista I had about 206,000 files and folders in Windows.old. You know I didn't delete 'em one at a time.

[Niles]

Thanks for the reply. I did see the "Windows Old" folder the first time I did the re-install but when I deleted it it only free'd up about 10gb and the hard drive was still almost full. The clean install worked much better.

[MilesAhead]

Thanks for the reply. I did see the "Windows Old" folder the first time I did the re-install but when I deleted it it only free'd up about 10gb and the hard drive was still almost full. The clean install worked much better.

It may in this particular case. Often though, if you can do a Custom Install, it has the advantage that dozens of portable apps can still be in place, provided you didn't park them under Program Files, and will work after the install is complete. I have a bunch of small utilities in C:\Utils. After a custom install I just drag shortcuts to wherever I want to launch from and they work without downloading or reinstalling etc..

Makes life easier if the little convenience utilities I'm used to are still there to help me get the new system tweaked the way I want. Depends on the individual and the setup. I know I hate hitting a hotkey combination and the hotkey app is not there. Once you get used to it being there it becomes a reflex.

[Niles]

Not being a user of "apps" this wasn't a problem - what I really wanted was to clear all the detrius off the hard drive and free up as much space as possible. This has now been done and it is like having a new computer.

[MilesAhead]

I understand. The comment was for future reference. Take a walk over to
http://www.autohotke...forum/index.php

http://www.techsupportalert.com/

http://win.softpedia.com/


Maybe you'll get hooked on the freebies

Another approach is set up with your standard programs and OS all clean and shiny, then make a backup image using Macrium Reflect or another similar program. If you build up too much sludge, just lay the image on. I use it for disaster recovery. I install way too many small apps and doodads to roll back my system. Instead I keep the system HD down to around 30% used and keep all the crap on externals.