Vex Star

My laptop has a 60gig hardrive (52 in ntfs terms). So I decided to reinstall XP, thus deleting everything because my laptop’s performance was shitty at best. I was getting highly variable fps on old games.

So anyways, everything went fine, but now I just realized my computer has 36 gigs of free space. Where did 16 gigs go?
You should have done a complete reformat of the drive before reinstalling. Also, you should download SP2 and SP3 onto CD from Microsofts website so you have them after the fresh install.

Most original XP disks do not have all of the drivers. SP2 will fix 90% of driver problems on a fresh install. SP3 is the latest (released this month) and contains all of the newest security updates and recent driver updates.

Why save them to a CD? If you run into issues and cannot get online to update.microsoft.com you can install the service packs and be up and running in no time.

Yeah… I am a computer geek from way back when the Commodore 64 was the schiznits.
My XP SP2 disk got damanged and the only thing i had left was XP no SP’s

god that thing was awful.

managed to get sp1, but gave up. managed to find a working SP2 disk and just installed in again.
I would download both SP2 and 3 and save them to CD for future issues… it is better to be safe than sorry.

Now with Microsoft pushing Vista, they may eventually remove those SP’s from the support site so its a good idea to have backups of them anyway.

Which is why I’m wondering why you would download SP2… SP3 supercedes it. It’s a waste of time to download SP2.

Regardless of how hard they’re pushing Vista, they won’t remove the service packs for older operating systems, even the ones for NT are still available…
I may be wrong… but I dont think that SP3 has everything on it that SP2 does. Thats why I suggested both.
Microsoft TechNet:

You are probably right… I just searched their site and they have updates for Windows 3.1 still.
This is the dumbest conversation evah.

Use nlite to copy all the files from the XP CD you have, slipstream SP2 onto it and burn a new disk.

Congratulations, you have now replaced your XP SP2 CD.

Then after the install update it to SP3.

(I imagine you can slipstream SP3, but I have never had a reason to try so….)
Yes you can slipstream SP3 - no need to install it after the fact.
So what can I do to recover that missing space.
Turns out my other profile is still here, but I have to find to delete (hence the missing gigs).

I am absolutely sure you can.
I have just never done it. I didn’t want to say that you could and then have a bunch of you morons get on my case cause you couldn’t.

To get back some missing space you can start by deleting that montrosity.

There are a set of 3 folders that take up a good bit of space…. language is the one folder…. I can’t remember what they are. Maybe setup?
Anyone?
Any help here?

Anyways…. if you are in doubt if you can delete something then rename the containing folder. Turn languages into languages_old. Reboot your PC a few times. When you feel solid that nothing evil is happening THEN you delete languags_old.

Of course you can also store the stuff on CD or DVD so you can always copy it back…

backups for the win.
Frankly, I would just install it again but delete the existing partition during the setup process. I can’t stand remnants on a fresh install, eve if they are benign.

This fix comes into help for those who installed Vista. I just reinstalled XP.

NVM. During the set-up I found three partitions. Two of them were too small to delete anything. I installed over the one having 35 gigs.

I thought that is what I said here:

I assumed that when reformatting that one would look to see what/if there were partitions and remove any that were not necessary.

Ok, I need to know how to do this.

I put the disc and made it start from the cd rom and it only fixed it.
I’ve also tried Partition Magic and disk management and while many people can see the missing hdd space, I can’t.

Somehow there are about 12gigs hidden inside.
when you did the install, did you delete all existing partitions, create a new one, reformat and install there? it sounds like you just did a new install on your existing partition or something like that.

Looks like it.
What can I do now?
Looks like I am gonna have to create a new partition, delete the existing one and reinstall on the new right?

I had to get your attention again somehow.

When you run the XP disk is should ask you where to install, and any existing partitions shouls be listed. You can highlight each partition and use the option to delete. once you delete them all you can format choosing to use all of the available space.

I did it already. I went into DOS mode. It gave me two choices. I could either fix C:/programs/windowsxp or ignore it and make a fresh install. I think I would be repeating my same mistake by picking the latter.

no, during the install it allows you to choose the partition as deus said. you did something wrong the first time, though i’m not exactly sure where you went wrong.

look at those steps.

Ok, I successfully reformated it and got all my precious gigs back. The only problem is now it asks me to pick which version of xp (there are only two)

Still it doesn’t bother me that much.

Oh btw, what is the name of the driver which lets me go back to the desktop once the computer is in sleep mode. Mine doesn’t do it (after the reformat)

i don’t know. it sounds like you are doing something wrong because if you are deleting the entire partition, then there should be no old version to boot. it shouldn’t even know you had an old version.

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October 19th, 2008 | Tags: Microsoft, operating system, operating systems | Category: general | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL