Odd problem with System Restore ... anyone any ideas?

[Carol Haynes]

I generally keep System Restore disabled on my system unless there is a compelling reason to enable it temporarily.

Today I am doing a mass cleanup and defragmentation session on some large drives and found on my external USB drive a large number of System Restore files appear in the 'most fragmented' files list after Perfect Disc finishes. Some are quite large files and there are dozens (if not hundreds) of them.

Anyone any idea how to get rid of these old System Restore Point files?

Normally when you disable System Restore it deletes all these files but obviously I must have had my USB drive switched off at the crucial moment and the files were left behind. Switching SR on and off on the drive has no effect and running the Windows DIskCleanup utility on the drive has no effect.

The files are obviously orphaned but I can't delete them manually as they are in the inaccessible "System Volume Information" folder which is locked by Windows.

Short of reformatting the drive (not practical as it is nearly 400Gb of data and I have nowhere large enough to copy it to) I can't see any way to get rid of them!

[app103]

I am not sure what file system you have on that drive, but this is one of those times that FAT32 and having an old 9x machine comes in handy. You would be able to delete them under 9x if it's not NTFS.

I have done it before.

Other than that the only suggestions I can come up with is this:

• Pop that drive in and create some files for 'temporary use'.
  
• Then turn on system restore and reboot.
  
• Create a restore point.
  
• Then delete the 'temporary' files and clear them from recycle bin.
  
• Then turn it off system restore again and reboot.

Or you can try a BartPE disk or Knoppix (or any other live CD linux distro that supports NTFS) to access that drive outside of windows.

Might get rid of it for you.

[Carol Haynes]

No I am using NTFS

When you have done this have you literally just deleted the files? Are there any consequences?

[app103]

I just deleted the whole folder...not just the files in it.

If you have system restore turned off, there are no consequences when you delete them, they are just gone and not taking up valuable space any more.

If you have it turned on, it will just recreate the folder again.

Edit: I have also deleted WinME's _Restore folder under XP on same drives.

[Carol Haynes]

I think all this came about because I had a multiboot system but all of those installations have now gone and only the rubbish remains.

I checked (using Acronis DiskDirector) and almost all of my partitions have loads of crap left over ... I'll try WinPE.

[Carol Haynes]

WOW - That worked great - and across all my drives/partitions I think I have recovered ~ 80Gb of disc space.

Not a bad freebie!

Some credits coming your way