Low Disk Space Warning on HP Recovery Disk?

[Alan Holbrook]

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.

 

[Ted Zieglar]

"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.)

Ted Zieglar

 

[userdave]

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_edits/lowdiskspace.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.

 

[ajacobson12]

I am having a similar problem. Did you find a solution to the "low disk
space on HP_RECOVERY"?

Thanks,

Al

 

[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