A couple weeks ago I did a clean install of Vista Home Basic. In the process I accidentally installed a full copy of it on the D: drive, which is labeled "RECOVERY" on my machine. I can't get rid of that useless copy of Vista on the D: drive now. Any ideas how to get that copy of Vista off my D: drive? Thanks!

Since you apparently now have a retail/OEM Vista Home Basic disc that you used to clean install Vista, why not get rid of the Dell Recovery partition - huh? You really don't need it anymore if you have an OS install disc. Simply delete the recovery partition & use the space for data. Jabbering Idiots: Everywhere You Look!

I have no idea how I should do that. After looking around online it doesn't seem like I need the partition since I have the disk. However, the only programs I found for it were Partition Magic, which said it wasn't supported on Vista anyway, and GParted which gives me a weird download file that neither my computer nor I know how to handle. I really don't want to reformat the whole thing since I just got it back up after the clean install. Is there a way to get rid of that partition, remove whatever is on the recovery partition while keeping my C drive? This is kinda new to me so the more instructions and help, the better. Thanks so much for helping me.

If the drive/partition containing the recovery files is not hidden, you can use disk management feature of Vista to remove or reformat the drive/partition. Right-click Computer in Start menu and select Manage... Then click Disk Management under Storage. Before removing or reformatting the drive/partition, if you haven't done so, just create a (bootable ?) dvd disk having the recovery files in case you may need them in the future. Hope the above helps. Regards SuatCINI

I found some instructions for merging the partitions at http://en.kioskea.net/faq/sujet-318... They worked well until the last step, which read: 6. Hence, select your drive C: and the option “Extend Volume”. You computer will automatically select empty available spaces on your hard disk, and you can alter them if you wish to do so. The option "Extend Volume" is grayed out (unavailable) for the C drive. So right now I have 10Gb of unallocated disk space that is still separated off from the main C drive and am unable to extend the C drive to use that unallocated space. Any ideas on how to do this? Again, thanks so much for your help.

Vista's disk management console does have some limitations, I would suggest you download & use gparted instead. Jabbering Idiots: Everywhere You Look!

Right click on 'computer' select 'manage' go to 'disk management' right click on 'recovery' partition and select 'format' Once you format the partition, you can use it for file storage. Rich Rich Gu