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  • Recovering disk space consumed by SP1 install on XP

    From John Caruso@johnSPAMcarAWAYuso@myprivacy.ca to comp.os.ms-windows.misc on Tuesday, July 01, 2003 22:27:02
    From Newsgroup: comp.os.ms-windows.misc

    A few months ago I tried installing Windows XP SP1 on my Toshiba 5105,
    but after doing so I ran into a problem (an incompatible sound driver)
    and had to uninstall it. The install itself took an enormous amount of
    disk space, and I did *not* get it all back after uninstalling SP1; I
    think the loss was over 1GB, but I didn't record before and after sizes
    so I can't say for sure.

    Since then, Explorer has been very unstable, and because an SP1-compatible sound driver is now available I decided to retry the install of SP1(a).
    The sound driver worked fine...but this time I had SP1 installed long enough
    to discover that some programs are dog slow under SP1 (which is apparently
    a known bug that MS has not seen fit to release an easily-downloadable fix for--thanks a lot). So, I had to back out SP1 yet again. Here are the
    disk space results:

    Before SP1 install: 23.4GB free
    After SP1 install: 21.3GB free
    After SP1 uninstall: 21.9GB free

    So installing SP1 chewed up 2GB (!?!) of my hard drive, but uninstalling it only gave me back 600MB. Does anyone have any idea where the additional
    1.4GB was consumed? Perhaps system restore (there are several checkpoints associated with the SP1 install)? I'd like to track down the missing disk space and recover it, and I'd also like to figure out where the lost space
    from the previous install is as well, and get that back also.

    - John
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  • From AFM@afm@tightfit.fsnet.co.uk to comp.os.ms-windows.misc on Wednesday, July 02, 2003 09:15:00
    From Newsgroup: comp.os.ms-windows.misc

    See yesterdays answer - System Restore can gobble up huge amounts of
    disk space - Enable viewing system Hidden files and Folders then look
    for a folder called _RESTORE or something like that mine is
    System Volume Information
    under which is
    _restore{80FAC382-54ED-42CC-BF01-520FCADD92E0}
    and is currently 2.5Gb... But I have a 20Gb XP Boot partition on the
    disk, so I am not worried. The Restore option is set to Max which is 12%
    of disk volume
    This is under System Restore in System Profiles

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