Low Disk Space Warning on HP Recovery Disk?

My son has an HP Pavilion at school and recently he's been getting a low
disk space warning (shows up in the system tray...) on his D:hp_recovery
drive. "Properties" shows the partition to be at 4.something gigs with
only 31.9 meg free. Of course, since this is an HP recovery partition,
Disk Cleanup doesn't recover anything, and defrag won't run on it because
of the lack of space. Any ideas about why the partition has filled up this
high? Anyway he can recover some space? Any way he can make the partition
bigger? (I've had him run several spyware/adware cleaners and his system
is pretty well clean by now, but the D: drive is still low on space).

TIA,
ARH
No .sig, I just post on impulse.

[ericwg888]

"I've had him run several spyware/adware cleaners and his system is pretty
well clean by now..."

There's your answer, right there.

In the first place, the recovery partition is normally hidden, to prevent it
from being damaged. Your son has clearly tampered with the recovery
partition, which is now seriously compromised. Since HP does not provide
software installation CDs, relying instead on a hidden recovery partition,
your son's ability to repair or reinstall his system is most likely gone.
Should your son need to recover his system he will need to go to a store and
purchase all the software that came with his computer.

Secondly, it is not sufficient to be "pretty well clean" of spyware. This
malicious junk is insidious. A computer is either free of spyware or it is
not. If he is not able to completely eradicate the spyware it will continue
to cause problems.

Sorry to sound like I'm lecturing, but your son's problem should never have
happened. It is entirely self-afflicted.

In the best of all possible outcomes, he will be able to completely remove
the spyware and then hide the recovery partition to make it invisible once
again. Good luck with that. Spyware can be notoriously difficult to remove.
And successfully removing spyware can leave a computer unstable.

Under the more likely outcome, your son will have to go out and buy the
software that came with his computer and reinstall everything from scratch.
(He shouldn't expect any sympathy from HP.)

Thanks Roger-

I found this helpful. As for Norton anti virus....I deleted it from the computer soon after i brought the computer home for the first time. i did not like it. I will try to delete the files than. Also glad to know that the "recovery partition- is well marked with the hp model so i shouldnt have a problem deleting the right ones.

I will give it a try and will report back here. Thanks Roger...appreciated

I started receiving the same "Low Disk Space - You are running out of
disk space on HP_Recovery (D:)" error message when I created my HP
Pavilion system recovery DVD's. Try running the registry edit from
http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/regs...wdiskspace.reg

It is prudent to have a good backup before you make registry changes.

The registry edit "lowdiskspace.reg" contains the following lines which
should stop the error message:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer]
"NoLowDiskSpaceChecks"=dword:00000001

Although I suppose it is possible that the angry man is right about
your son, I did not tamper with my recovery partition, so your son may
be innocent. Any utility which wrote temporary work files to the
partition which it did not clean up later might have caused this error.


--
userdave

Al,

Did you try executing the registry edit that I listed on my last post?
That fixed the problem for me.

Just open the link, then right click>"Save Page As">(Leave the default
name as) "lowdiskspace.reg" and save it to your "Desktop". Then
double-click on the icon on your desktop to run it. You will receive a
warning "REGISTRY EDITOR: Are you sure you want to want to add the
information in "C:\..." to the registry?" If you click on "Yes", your
registry will be updated and you should no longer receive the error.
You can delete the icon from your desktop after you run it.

If the link from my post ever becomes obsolete, just type the lines
which I listed in my last post into a text file named
"lowdiskspace.reg" and then execute it.

Regards,
David


--
userdave

[TWaddell]

If you're like me, you're not comfortable messing with the windows registry. An easy way to make this change is to download Tweak UI. It's part of the Powertoys for Windows XP package. Once you've downloaded it, click on taskbar and start menu and uncheck the "warn when low on disk space" option. This will make the appropriate change to the windows registry for you. Log off, then log back on and you're good to go.

In response to above, the recovery partition was probably not tampered with, the message starts to occur once you've made a set of recovery disks as prompted.

T

[k1dbLITZ]

Ted-

I suggest you stop handing out "advice" (if you can call false accusations and assumptions, advice), at least until you know what you're talking about, if that day ever comes.

That's right, I took the time to become a member of this forum so that I could reply to a post you made nearly four years. That's how much people like you piss me off.

Clearly, you thrive on conflict and being a prick to people. The problem with that is, some less informed people may actually follow your "advice". Anyone who is in the industry can sniff out your BS a mile away. Don't pretend to appear "computer savvy" when you're in fact just getting your jollies off by putting other people down.

[Rogerbird1]

Hello,

I have seen the low disk space warning caused by a program like Symantec's Norton 360. It has a auto backup feature that by default writes the data backup to the d: drive, meaning the recovery partition. which in short order fills it up.

You will need to either turn off the auto backup feature in Norton(or what ever it has) or set it to backup to a different drive, like an external hdd or a DVD or CDR. You cannot set(Norton) it to write to anywhere on the C: drive, it wont let you.

If the D: drive is already full, you will need to find the Backup files and move them (or delete) off the D: partition. Be careful not to delete the 'Recovery partition' data.

I hoe this helps.

Roger

[jlsoaz]

I ran into this annoying problem today. After reading over the series of posts to this forum, I solved it by venturing into that partition, which I had carefully avoided, and removing some files that didn't belong there. It came up today because I was doing a restore operation via jungle disk and for some reason the files were placed there. This was not my intention. However, it brought the whole storage space matter to the fore, and so I cleaned out the botched restores and a few other random files that had apparently ended up there. The folders that were properly there seemed to be clearly marked (when I clicked on them they gave a recovery partition warning). So: good. I was able to have confidence that what I was deleting was some dreck that didn't belong there, such as the botched restore and a few MP3 files that somehow ended up there, I don't know how.

Anyway, your point about Symantec was helpful, because it seemed (as far as I could tell from reading this thread) that there might be more than one scenario that might lead to some files going there that shouldn't be there.

[Katy]

BINGO! The Norton's fix did it for me. It's been stuffing backups in there ever since I installed 360. Elected to manually back up from here on out.
Excellent advice!