[Jochew9]

I am very novice to Windows Vista Home Premium. I've owned this computer for about a month now and am becoming very frustrated. I know what My C Drive is. My DVD-CD Drive is E. When I click on Computer it says I have Drives F,G,H, & I which are removable. It also days my D Drive is my recovery drive and is 99.9% full.

Do I need all of these drives? If not please tell me how do do away with them. If I need them tell me what for and when I would use them.

My D Drive (Recovery) is full, I deleted all of my Pictures and documents (which is what I would want to save) and it is still full. Personally, I would like to back up my personal files onto a flash drive(which I haven't purchased yet) so I could store it elsewhere. Do I need this D Drive?

In essence I would like my D Drive not to be full all of the time (It keeps sending up a balloon notifying me). Know how to use and back up onto a flash drive. Could you please recommend a size of Flash drive to back up photos and documents. Eventually I plan on loading all of my Music CD's (400+) onto this computer. I hope I gave you enough info in order for your help. Thanks.

Jochew9

[katabby]

your d drive is your recovery partition, which restores your computer back to the way it came from the factory. You should not be using it for backing up anything else. Since it is for Recovery only, it should be full to save space on your hard drive. You only have 1 hard drive. The other drive letters on my computer are for the media card reader, and my front usb slot shows up as drive l when i plug in a flash drive. the size you need is dependent on what you need to store on it.
you should have burnt recovery cd's or dvd's from drive d before you messed with it, in case you need to reinstall vista.( you will, eventually). The removable drives you mentioned are not removable, just the devices you plug into them, such as Usb Flash and photo cards. They are not doing anything when not in use and don't interfere with your hard drive, so don't mess with them.

[katabby]

when you get a flash drive you should get a "fast" one so it can be used for vista's ready-boost feature

[Jochew9]

Vista saved everything on D drive I loaded on my computer automatically including my photo & document files. I only deleted my photo & document files. A balloon keeps coming up telling me that my D drive is full and I need to get rid of some items in order to not have it so full???

[DaveA]

When you deleted these (I deleted all of my Pictures and documents) which drive did you remove them from?
If from the C drive you need to copy them back from the D drive to the C drive and then delete them from the D drive.


The D drive is your SYSTEM Recover drive and is NOT to be used.
Your backups should have been to a external drive, CD or flash drive.

You may have hosed your System recover if you ever need it. [sorry]

[fortytworc]

I may have missed the answer to this part of the question : Do I need all of these drives? If not how do I get rid of them?
fortytworc

[katabby]

You don't need to get rid of these drives. F,G,H, and I, the removable drives. They are for camera cards like smart media, Compact flash etc. you have a multimedia card reader on your computer with 4 little slots, for the different types of media cards. They don't do anything until you plug something into them. I'm sure they could be removed, but why? They use NO resources until they are in use.

[fairnooks]

If there are so many drives showing up on the My Computer explorer page that its driving you nuts and you don't use the card reader at all get a technician to disconnect it for you. If you open up the case and follow the connecting lines from the front panel (back of the card reader) you can probably successfully remove the plug from the motherboard yourself. Don't pull it if you aren't sure though.

[BMR528]

Actually he easiest thing to do would ve to just disable the drives in the device manager,
right click on My Computer, click on Manage, when that window opens up click on Device Manager and then Disk drives. on my system all the card reader "Drives" are called "Generic" Compact Flash USB. or something to that affect. I would suggest that you disable one at a time and don't disable the C: hard drive.