Hard disk drive recovery c full - help!  

Hi niccih, sorrry I am late. I had to do some video work and that takes a long time which is in the nature of the beast.

I see that you got a lot of good advice from my friends. You made a wise decision to reinstall because the other option would have been rather rocky.

It looks like you are well under way and already managed to boot the installation disk. You do want to install to the big partition which I think was C. I am slightly worried about the mess on your disk (e.g. that the D partition shows as active). Let's hope the installer can deal with it. If not, we will have to first clean the disk. But we will cross this bridge if the installation you are trying now does not work.

I will keep in touch.

marsmimar said:

niccih said:

Hey no problem I just appreciate all your help. Please don't feel you have to reply immediately all the time.

I can't speak for anyone else, but at my advanced age I feel that I have to reply right away. I might not get another chance!

LOL - you are right. You never know what might happen the next minute - especially with me. I may be the most "advanced".

Yes, marsmimar is right. Delete everything if that option shows up.

This is good news. Now we have to do the following steps:

1. as marsmimar says, you need an anti virus program. Chances are there is a 3 month trial version that came with the installation disk. That has to be uninstalled first with a special uninstaller before installing MSE (which is a good free option from Microsoft)

if there is a 3 month trial, it is most likely Norton (Symantec) or McAfee. Please check that and let us know which one it is so we can give you the correct uninstaller. Uninstalling with the usual windows uninstaller will not do. We then can proceed with MSE.

2. It is unlikely that you have to install any drivers because they usually come automatically - unless you have some very special devices. If any, let us know.

3. There will be a lot of updates coming from Microsoft. Install those but if you see SP1, do not install that together with any other updates. That works best when installed alone. Whenever you see the yellow shield on top of the Sleep/Shutdown button in the start menu, go first to Control Panel\System and Security\Windows Update and inspect the updates before you install them. Then install them from there and not from the Sleep/Shutdown button. And as I said, if you see SP1 with a bunch of other updates, select all the others first and install those. Then proceed with SP1.

4. Imaging - I would take an image of the system asap and then whenever you have accomplished a major step. Define an "Images" folder on your external disk and image with Macrium. Here is my video tutorial which will explain how to use it. But do not forget the first step which is to burn the Macrium recovery CD (that contains a little Linux program which can restore the image(s)). That CD you will need in the event that you have to restore to an image. Then define your image as explained storing it to your Images folder on the external. Once defined, you later only have to highlight the XML file and click on the cog wheel - and off it goes.

If you encounter any difficulties or have any questions, let me know. And do not use the Windows7 native imaging facility. It is a real dog and guaranteed to get you into trouble.

5. There are some other things that would be useful to do like weeding out your startup programs and moving your data to a seperate data partition. But those we can discuss once you are done with the above.