Cell wrote:Now I'm confused....All this time I thought you were unable to boot into vista.
I fixed it when I tried putting the "Windows Anytime Upgrade" DVD that came with the laptop into the drive to see how much it was going to cost me to "upgrade" to a working Vista - turns out that it's got the repair stuff that a regular Windows install disc has. Whoops ! It allowed my computer to boot to a point where Vista asked me if I'd like to try to fix my still non-booting system. Well... I guess I had the M$ repair tools all this time. The ones that I read about days ago and didn't think I had.
With jaunty people have had bad experiences letting the installer do the work for em...over writing their Microsoft partitions.(this is that 1% were linux might not do what you ask )So use the installer,and edit the partition manually.
Oh, ok. I tend to look for manual/advanced options. I probably should stop doing that . But I'll not be using the auto-pick option so if the M$ partitions get overwritten, it won't be the installer program's fault.
During normal use a microsofts os will make backup images(not everything,but just system folders.) without the user knowing.It can be shut off,but is not by default.Over time theses images will eat hard drive space...without a user's knowledge.
edit:I should add that you should turn it off,and delete those recovery files if your trying to gain disk space.
If you are talking about the System Restore points and VSS, yes those are set up on my system. I might want to leave them enabled for a week or so to make sure that Vista has truly repaired itself. It must have used them in the repair process because I got told that I needed to update to the service pack that I already updated to (so it must have regressed).
I installed a trial copy of a Vista system optimization tool (no, it doesn't just do a format of the c: drive and tell you to install linux - although that would fit the definition of optimizing it ) and used it to consolidate free space. It did a great job - and then a reboot and Firefox run put a block of data almost on the end of the free space. Windows, lol. I'll run it again and immediately shut down and pop the Ultimate Edition DVD in and see what happens. Going to write down a few passwords and export my bookmarks to an html file first this time though.