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Solve : Slow running Compaq. Out of space on D: backup?

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Hi and thanks for taking interest in my problem.

My friends compute is a compaq pressario and is running slow. She asked me to "fix it up" if I can!

The hard drive is an IDE about 60 Gig with several drive allocations D: is set up for recovery & the card readers in the front panel. I,F,G,H.
This computer is running Windows Vista Home Basic, SP 2, has 2 gig of ram.

D:, the recovery destination, is only 5.7 gig and had 5.69 gig in it.

The C: drive is 68.8 Gig and has about 15 Gig space on it.. So prretty full, but no so much I would have thought to make it run so slow.
I deleted a few programs that were not in use but that didn't give me very much space in return.

I cleaned out all the dust with a vacuum, removed the heat sink and replaced the thermal cream, then ran Windirstat to find out what was where.
I don't know if doing a Defrag would do so much either.

D: seems to be part of the problem ( maybe all of it) and so I need to allocate more space to it. Can someone guide me please as to how I should go about this please.

To give her some more space I thought the easiest way was to put in another drive and move all the photo's and videos over to the new drive. ( Yes I took a back up of them already. Thanks for thinking of me.)

I added a 40 Gig to it, however there is only the one IDE connection on the motherboard (which is a 945GCT-HM), with only one drive connection on that ribbon. I changed the ribbon to a ribbon with 2 connections and added the new drive pinned as a slave.
When I booted it up the second drive is not acknowledged? Everything else went OK.

Question there is, will it be recognized?

Thank you in advance for any suggestions you might give.

(I'm nearly a Guru. Well, in their eyes. Really I'm just a mere mortal.)  The 2nd drive needs to be jumpered as Slave...and connected to the middle connector on the ribbon cable.

P.S. Never use a vacuum insice a PC...they generate tons of static electricity...enough to damage critical components.Thanks patio, I have the drive on the end of the cable for distance compliance more than anything. I jumped it as a slave though.
I'll have to get a longer twin cable then and try it.

and

WOW I didn't know that. Guess I'm just lucky I didn't spark up a fire in there with the vac.

Like I said, everything worked OK when I fired it up. (Kissed on the (cheek) then. )
I won't do that again. I'll get a compressed air can next time.
Does that computer also have SATA connectors on the motherboard?  I have a Compaq tower system, a Pentium 4, that has both IDE and SATA connectors on the motherboard.  I'm currently using a SATA hard drive in it.  Yes soybean, the SATA is connected to the CD Player/burner and there is a second one available on the mobo.

I dont want to put too much effort into it though, I dont want to change drives or put my good SATA drives in it.

After all it is the "X sex".

I would like to just open up some more space on the recovery drive now to allow for backups to take place.
D: drive has allocated 5.7Gb of space total with 7.2 Mb free.
If someone could give me a hint how I can do this I would be very happy. I would like to give it back soon.


I added the drive in correctly now (thanks patio ) and transfered about 14 Gb to it, out of the 40 Gb free on the new E:drive.
Pictures, videos,downloads, that sort of thing. All the big space thieves. ( I haven't deleted them off the C: drive yet though. Thats next now that I'm sure it is all OK. )

I have been researching this "make recovery bigger" and from what I researched .... You cant!

A post from patio here suggests I don't play with it?

( I actually went to other sites about this too as a matter of info. Howtogeek, techguy, microsoft etc. )

From microsoft website
"System Restore has an automatic restore point space-management feature that purges the oldest restore points to make room for new ones, while still enabling the user to recover from any recent destructive changes.

In Windows 7 on computers with hard drives over 64 GB, System Restore can take up to 5 percent of the disk or a maximum of 10 GB of the disk space, whichever is less. On computers with hard drives of 64 GB or less, System Restore can take at most 3 percent of the disk space.

In Windows Vista, System Restore can take up to 15 percent of the size of the volume or a maximum of 30 percent of the free disk space, whichever is less."

So is the allocation a Windows thing or can I adjust it to a larger amount of space.
Is it a percentage of the drive size?
So many questions where do I start?

Many thanks for your assistance, ImnoGuru.A reference: http://lifehacker.com/254365/vista-tip--reduce-system-restore-disk-usage Quote from: ImnoGuru on July 13, 2013, 06:27:22 AM

I added a 40 Gig to it, however there is only the one IDE connection on the motherboard (which is a 945GCT-HM), with only one drive connection on that ribbon. I changed the ribbon to a ribbon with 2 connections and added the new drive pinned as a slave.
When I booted it up the second drive is not acknowledged? Everything else went OK.

When you have two IDE drives connected to a Cable, one needs to be jumpered as Slave (as you've done) but the other will need to be jumpered as Master.

There are several settings for IDE Drives.

1. Single Drive. This is usually the state the Drive come in by default, and it means it is the only Drive connected to that IDE Cable.
2. Master. This means the Drive is the First Device on that ATA Controller, And that there is a second drive. This distinction is required so the Drive knows to expect to 'see' commands that are actually intended for the other device.
3. Slave. Pretty much the same as above, but means it is the second Device. (There is no actual "Master/Slave" relationship between the two devices, just numeric designations that somehow ended up with that moniker).
4. Cable Select. This requires the use of an ATA Ribbon cable that has the wiring for the "CSEL" signal. Typically you can tell if your ATA Controller (on a motherboard) supports Cable Select by seeing if your Connector is missing a pin. Host Controllers that do not support CSEL typically omit the CSEL pin, which means of course that CSEL will not work on those systems. The way this works is relatively simple: that pin is connected but only to the "Master" (first) device connector. In this fashion Cable Select is the only way that the connection order will matter.

CS seems like an attractive option but it never really caught on; between making sure your motherboard works with it, your cable has the CSEL connector, and your drives know to check it for self-configuration at power on (again, usually you can determine this through a missing pin), you're usually better off just jumpering one as Master, and one as Slave and just dodging all the confusion. Master Slave is basically telling the Drive which messages to accept. When the Controller sends a "ATA Command" to the device it will start off with saying "This command is for Device 0" or "this command is for device 1". If you jumper a drive as master, it will see the "This command is for Device 0" and say "That's me!" and deal with the command; if you jumper it as Slave it will become equally enthusiastic about seeing "This command is for Device 1".

When the BIOS first auto-detects, it sends a ATA Command to each channel; basically "This Command is for Device 0: What are you?" and "This command is for Device 1: What are you" and PROPER jumper and CS settings will make sure the correct drive responds.

When a Drive has no jumpers, it basically assumes everything being sent is for it. So it responds to both those queries. And the BIOS is like "OK OK, so there is only one drive, you can shut up now". Even if you have a second Drive, it's response is ignored.

If they are jumpered the same, both drives respond to both queries. This confuses everything involved. Like a PARENT who's two young children are tugging on each PANT leg, it just ignores them and keeps washing dishes. Thankfully unlike the computers on "Star Trek" we don't make ours out of Explodium yet, so they don't explode from this minor issue.

(TL;DR: Jumper one as Master, Jumper the Other as Slave)

All that out of the way:

The D: drive is probably not the issue. (Why do you suspect it is). It seems to me more likely that the D Drive is actually the recovery partition. This would explain why it's pretty much full. Recovery partitions contain essentially images that can be restored, much like a Recovery Disk. They are not used for storing Windows System Restore Backups. I'm not sure if you think this is the case or if I misunderstood.

Usually the Recovery Partition cannot be resized, because it's actually the first partition on the disk, so you cannot resize it without moving everything on the C: Drive over a few seats

For the specific issue you are trying to solve (slow performance) the very first thing I would investigate would be things such as malware and unnecessary startup applications, which typically are what cause a hefty percentage of those sorts of problems.

Good luck and keep us posted Well BC_Programmer, that was indeed a very informative narrative.

Now I have it all settled where they all need to live, with the right addresses & zip codes, everyone is talking the same language and living in harmony... but the D: drive is still out of space!
Quote from: ImnoGuru on July 20, 2013, 12:37:45 AM

D: drive has allocated 5.7Gb of space total with 7.2 M b free.


So any chance of giving it a nudge to the right? ( I suppose its like moving the house 20 inches over to get a bigger driveway)

I ran MSE, SuperAntiSpyware and MalwareBytes and it certainly did speed it up.

After I deleted a few programs that weren't needed or used, it settled down to a reasonable, useable state.

The D: drive has a couple of folders in it named, Mandy-PC, RECOVERY and MediaID.Bin.
Recovery wont let me in, but of the other 2, Mandy PC has several backup files in it. Bin I cant open either.

Can I set up another section/folder and send the backups to a new destination?D: is a recovery partition. It's supposed to be full. It being full will not affect performance.Thanks BC_Programmer, I didn't realize that.

So when it performs a new backup, (I'm thinking that it deletes the first one to make space for the current backup) the computer automatically overwrites the details with new information.

If that's the case then all's good with it now then. 

I have it running quicker, the computer has an extra drive in it that works ok, the drive has space now thanks to the new E: drive, the unused programs are deleted and all potential threat/viruses are gone.
Great stuff.
I'd be pretty happy if I got my computer with all these pluses.
I can actually give it back now YAHOO!!!

Many thanks everyone with your assistance.

You never know, another 10 years and IWillBeAGuru. hahahahaha. Quote from: ImnoGuru on July 27, 2013, 09:23:03 AM
So when it performs a new backup, (I'm thinking that it deletes the first one to make space for the current backup) the computer automatically overwrites the details with new information.

A recovery partition just contains an image of a brand-new Windows install so when you run the recovery CD (if there is one!) you put the machine back to as-new, factory condition. All the user's  installed software, updates, emails, documents, etc that were on C: will just vanish. Forever. It is most definitely NOT a backup.

Thanks Salmon Trout for explaining that.

I just had another Ah-ha moment. 

Not a backup at all. Hmm. Well I'm GLAD I copied all the photo's, videos and (I thought they were )important bits and saved them to a USB before playing with it.
At least now I know those items are safe for her.

I can see some more work coming from this... I wonder if she even has a recovery CD?  I don't think I'll ask. Quote from: ImnoGuru on July 27, 2013, 10:21:22 AM
I can see some more work coming from this... I wonder if she even has a recovery CD?  I don't think I'll ask.

You can usually download a CD image from the maker's site and burn it or if not, order a disk by mail. There may be a small fee for this.


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