how do re-allocate disc space for restore on vista??

artyeva

i'm a complete non tech but have narrowed the problems i have with space on my c drive down to the amount being used up by system restore. vista is telling me i have 3.4GB free of 117GB, but the properties of everything on the drive comes to just 28.2GB.

i found an article that says the following should be carried out using admin permissions in command function:

1. Type "vssadmin Resize ShadowStorage /For=[your hard disk]: /On=[your hard disk]: /MaxSize=[how much space you want to allocate]"
2. For example: "vssadmin Resize ShadowStorage /For=C: /On=C: /MaxSize=2GB"
3. You should get a message saying Successfully resized the shadow copy storage association, and you should have more free space on your hard drive.

problem is - this doesn't work - i get the error message that this is not a valid prompt. can anyone help??

also, assuming this gives me a few extra GB, where is the other 70 or so GB being used???!!!

please help a complete technofobe

Capt'n Midnight

http://searchenterprisedesktop.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid192_gci1251675,00.html

So what's happened? In the seven years since Windows XP came out, drive sizes have exploded. In 2001, 40 to 80GB was the high end of the storage capacity you could expect to purchase with a new computer; today, 500GB to 1TB is not unheard of. Microsoft's philosophy is that using 15% of 500GB (or even 250GB or 160GB) is far less onerous for the average user than using 15% of 80GB was in 2001.

it's not system restore as that only uses 15% of your drive

use
spacemonger / treesize / sequoiaview to find out what is really taking up the space

artyeva

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

it's not system restore as that only uses 15% of your drive

use
spacemonger / treesize / sequoiaview to find out what is really taking up the space

i used spacemonger and have found out the following -

68.3GB taken up by pagefile.sys
14.3GB taken up by 'unreadable' files

ok - sorry about this but can anyone help me with the next step - ie - how do i find out what these are and get rid of what i don't need?

tman

The size of pagefile.sys seems to be your problem... When your pc runs out of ram, it uses this file as virtual memory... It really shouldn't grow over a few gigabytes

(will edit with a more useful post in a sec)

/EDIT
When you shut down your pc, do you use the power symbol, or click the arrow to the right and choose shut down?
If you've been using the power symbol, try shutting the pc down properly and turning it on, the pagefile should in theory reset to a sensible size then

Capt'n Midnight

http://tweakhound.com/vista/tweakguide/page_6.htm
To adjust the settings:

Press the Windows + Pause Break keys > in the left pane click on Advanced system settings > click on the Advanced tab > in the Performance section click the Settings... button > click on the Advanced tab . click on the Change... button. Highlight the drive you wish to work with.

your pagefile shouldn't be more than 3 times your ram unless you have very specific reasons and I'm not sure if

FYI even if the pagefile is huge doesn't mean it can be used
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555223
RAM, Virtual Memory, Pagefile and all that stuff

At some point, the resource in critical short supply can not be increased. This means an architectural limit has been reached. Some commonly reported architectural limits in Windows include:

1. 2 GB of shared virtual address space for the system
2. 2 GB of private virtual address space per process
3. 660 MB System PTE storage
4. 470 MB paged pool storage
5. 256 MB nonpaged pool storage

The above applies to Windows 2003 Server specifically (from Knowledgebase article 294418), but also apply to Windows XP and Windows 2000.

above refers to windows xp 32 bit but similar though higher limits apply to visa meaning that 68GB pagefile is wayyy to big for a desktop in 2008

artyeva

ok - i folled the above steps for shutting down properly but this didn't have any effect. I then tried reducing the amount of virtual memory, snd this has done 2 things. When I scan now with spacemonger i have 67.2GB free (yay) and 14.8GB of unreadable files - but NOW when I go into see what these unreadable files are - where as before I had 2 files, now I have 128? Huh?!

anyway - thanks a million for that, i really am a div when it comes to this stuff, thanks for being so patient with me :P

by the way - all this is because i was having problem with skipping when playing video and audio in either media player or divx player. after exhausting all other possibilities it was suggested to me that the reason could be the fact i only had 2GB free memory. So now this is sorted, fingers x'ed!!!!!

thanks again guys

:P