I get a message saying: "memory low on recovery disc D". How can I fix this problem?

[wiretech]

I have a Dell Inspiron 1545 laptop. I am running Windows 7. I get a message saying that “recovery disc D is low on memory”. The capacity of the disc is 14.9GB. A breakdown of the files on D is as follows:

Dell / Image / factory.wim 4.26GB 2/4/10
George-PC 9.76GB 2/6/11

George-PC has the files:

Backup set 1/30/11 6.23GB
Backup set 2/6/11 3.53GB
mediaID.bin 1/4/11 528 bytes

Program Files 6.62MB 2/4/10
Sources 1.1MB 1/29/08
Tools 1.5MB 3/12/10
Users 1.34MB 1/19/08
Windows 899 MB 2/4/10

It seems that the two largest files are “Dell” and “George-PC”.
Question: What files do I need to safely delete to stop getting the “low on memory” message? Please help.

[pam123]

Your recovery partition holds the system restore settings for your laptop so don't delete Dell image.

If you don't have recovery disks for your laptop you should make them.

The other back ups appear to be part of Win7's automatic backup function and that has to do with how you set that up.
If you just left it to itself that would be the problem.

Go into System Backup and find out what's going on.

[edfair]

You can't safely delete anything at this point. If you delete anything on George you are at risk until you have another backup. If you delete Dell you are at risk forever in case the operating system crashes (unless you have made and tested alternate media).

Given your circumstances I would buy 2 USB memory sticks of 8 gb each and do a backup to one of them. that should use about 6 gb. Once you have that you can remove George. Then it is a matter of copying george to a memory stick (alternating them each time) each time a backup is made and deleting george in preparation for the next backup.

[rwest]

i think there's a way to allocate more memory for backup and system restore. You may not have to delete anything.

I'm running 7 also, I'll look around and see if I can find it. Pretty sure I've seen an option for this. My backups are on a seperate drive, so I've never fooled with it.

This may help:
Windows 7
1. Right click "Computer" and click "Properties." If this icon isn't displayed on the desktop, find it on the Start menu.
2. Click the "System protection" link on the left side of the screen.
3. Confirm that the "System Protection" tab is selected, then click the "Configure" button.
4. Lower the slider bar next to "Max Usage" to adjust the space allocated for system restore points.