Windws.old

[Darren M]

Hey, just joined these forums hoping to get some he with vista and in
turn give any help i can to others from my vista experience.

My Rock Pegasus 670 was running slowly, tried defrag and various other
methods but no luck so i decided to reformat, re-install vista and
start fresh.
Im reasonably happy with the results, need some drivers for volume
control buttons from rock that im having trouble finding but thats not
what im here for.

A folder called Windows.old was automatically created on my C: (im
runnning home premium incase ure wonering) and from the looks of it,
its simply a backup of my old C:. So not needing anything from it i
decided to delete it, just to check i looked in the folders properties
which stated it was around 11-12GB, but on attmpting to delete it more
than 12GB was being deleted. It went all the way up to 63.5GB and was
still rising buti decided to stop it, is this normal?

Im not a genious whe it comes to computers but i get along fine, was
just wrried incase some of my new windows files were being deleted.

Any help appreciated, and sorry for the long post.

 

[Charlie42]

A folder called Windows.old was automatically created on my C: (im
runnning home premium incase ure wonering) and from the looks of it,
its simply a backup of my old C:.

Like you say, it contains your old OS. It can be used for restoring it,
should you ever decide to roll back. The folder also contains backups of
your old user files.

So not needing anything from it i decided to delete it, just to check i
looked in the folders properties which stated it was around 11-12GB, but
on attmpting to delete it more than 12GB was being deleted. It went all
the way up to 63.5GB and was still rising buti decided to stop it, is this
normal?

No. Only those 12GB should be deleted. Is there a chance you have
inadvertently marked something more for deletion? Can you tell us how much
disk space was freed up during this operation?

Im not a genious whe it comes to computers but i get along fine, was
just wrried incase some of my new windows files were being deleted.

Not as long as WinVista seems to work as normal. Anyway, UAC would have been
screeming and shouting if you attempted to delete system files.

Charlie42

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

If you deleted a large folder you will see a progress bar and a calculation
going on as more and more subfolders are opened and enumerated. The amount
continues to grow as the estimate of the size of the delete continues to be
calculated. This calculation can last a half hour or more with a constantly
growing calculated size with the amounts of data you describe. This is
expected behavior with multi-GB deletes.

You did not reformat. You would not have any windows.old folder if you had.
What you did do was a custom install. A custom install is not the same
thing as a classic clean install and does not reformat the disk unless it is
a raw disk or has a non-NTFS file system on it. If you had 60GB of files on
your hard drive before you started the custom install then you would see
numbers like you are describing when attempting to delete the windows.old
folder later.

So far what you describe is expected behavior.