How to shift system restore data to another HDD??

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Rollux

362 posts

Ultimate Geek

#16821 29-Oct-2007 20:04

I am running XP MCE2005, with a 250Gb SATAII primary HDD. I also have an old 27gb IDE drive that i have freshly formatted and will use as a backup until i can afford an 80gb unit for a full drive backup, and another 500gb for movie/music storage.
In the meantime, how do I shift my system restore data, paging file etc to my backup drive so I can get the most out of my SATA drive storage wise? My primary drive only shows a useable 232Gb, and it is almost full.
Thanks in advance for your help

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Tarq57

156 posts

Master Geek

#93657 4-Nov-2007 10:56

I'm not expert at this sort of thing, but I'm pretty sure you can't. The system restore is part of the system, users, even with admin rights, can't access it. I've tried this in the past by restarting in safe mode and getting in to the computer admin account (which is a computer account only), in order to view the restore folders, and there was no advantage in the end and it was quite a job to get them back doing what they are supposed to.
The page file is in constant use by the OS, so, when enabled (recommended) is constantly being accessed. It is best to let Windows manage the pagefile, but as a rule of thumb it should be set to about 150% of the physical memory. (About 3072 in your case)
A possible compromise is to either turn system restore off, with obvious drawbacks if something goes wrong, or reduce the size of it. I think the windows default is 12%, which on a big drive is a lot of space occupied. You should be able to reduce it to about 5 to 7%, and will of course loose a number of earlier restore points by so doing. (But, how many do you need? It was designed this way because when XP was designed, disks were much smaller, and 12% did not represent maybe a year of restore points.)

paulchinnz

Circumspice
793 posts

Ultimate Geek

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#96951 26-Nov-2007 13:14

Been wondering about this myself to free up space and allow greater system restore storage. Any help from the guys usually in the know? Looks like short of installing another program it can't be done without a fair bit of random cutting and pasting.