Re-Install question.

I recently (2 days ago) received my Pavillion DV9000....my question is to whether it should have come packaged with CD's/DVD with my copy of Vista...or is it always loaded upon the laptop immediately?

The reason I ask is because I am having HD problems already....roughly 28gb's of space has vanished, and as of yet I cannot find the reason for this. I was considered reinstalling the Vista OS...which is what brought me to my first question.

Thanks for your help.

 

Unless when you ordered your DV9000 with recovery discs which I believe costs an additional $15.00 then it is unlikely your Laptop included them.

 

There is a restore partition on your HDD for you to reinstall Vista. HP apparently stopped shipping their laptops with Anytime Upgrade discs.

 

HP doesn't send you a set of recovery disks unless you order them, which they make you pay for. I don't have my laptop at the moment, but there should be a system recovery option inside of the programs section on the start menu that will allow you to reinstall the entire OS to factory defaults and you can burn your own set of recovery disks as well. You get to choose whether you want to burn 2 DVDs or I think its like 6 or 7 CDs, but you don't need to burn these in order to do a reinstall through the HP recovery program.

Now, if you didn't want to use HP's reinstall, which will reinstall all the bloatware as well, you can try and get your hands on a CD for your OS and use the CD key on the bottom of your laptop and then download and reinstall all the drivers for your laptop from HP's website. If you have any other questions let me know.

 

As already said, you can recover from a partition on the drive, and you can also burn recovery disks. I STRONGLY RECOMMEND that you burn the discs. It costs' less than $1 in discs, and it gives you the ability to restore to the factory configuration if you need to, including all of the pre-installed software.

There's also the issue of a clean install, which is an install that does not contain any of the preinstalled software, just Windows. You can read about that following the Clean install guide in my sig.

As far as the missing disk space, there are a few places it can go:

• Recovery partition: HP has a recovery partition which contains their OS image. You probably see it as another drive when you open a file explorer.
• temp files. temp files always eat up your space
• Volume Shadow Copy: this is probably where it's going. Vista uses a service called volume shadow copy which keeps not only system restore points, but also previous versions of files and folders for all of your data. The default allocation for this is %20 of the disk space I believe. You can see how much it's using by opening a "cmd" window as administrator and typing: "vssadmin list shadowstorage". That will tell you how much it is using. You can learn how to tune this setting here

 

Thanks for the help there guys; form the sounds of it Volume Shadow Copy is indeed most likely. I checked up on some other threads and it definitely sounds right when considering the inclusion of deleted files etc. I had plenty of problems installing Oblivion in fact having to reinstall/delete it far too many times. I will check it out with the link orev posted and post again if I have sucess.


EDIT: Hmmm odd..i go into the command window and type the command; it states that I need to run the utility from a command window that has elevated admin privileges...confusing seeing as I am the admin.

 

Welcome to Vista UAC. You need to right-click on the "Command Prompt" icon and choose "run as administrator". Even though you're logged in as admin, you're not.

 

Your pc is programed to create a restore point everyday, and everytime it does that, you loose about 15% of your memory. You may be able to delete those restore points and restore the memory by following the steps below. good luck

Start - Accessories - System Tools - Disk Cleanup - Select total computer - Select your current Hard Drive (Should be default C: )

After it's done calculating, a new window will pop out, click on "More Options" tab at top, then you will see the section of "System Restore and Shadow Copies", then click on "Clean Up..." and confirm "Delete"

Caution: Do NOT click on "OK" to close the window, Click on "Cancel"

 

What does it do if I click OK?