Windows XP forum: Win XP System Restore: Delete individual restore points

Thanks for your prompt response. I've read the article link you provided. It offers much information but I don't know much about system restore and need some clarification.

1. I assume this means "user profiles"? Wouldn't they be on the system drive? How would a user profile be put in the recovery partition (D:) or on a second hard drive(G:)?

2. I understand about the system drive. If I turn off system restore for my D: partition or G: drive, will it affect the system drive C: ?

3. If I want to delete an individual restore point on the system drive C:, do I need to delete the same restore points on D: and G: or will Windows handle it?

One of the links has indicated that individual restore points can be deleted directly from the System Volume Information folder. Is this not the case?

How can I determine if there are profiles on a drive?

To my knowledge, I have put no profiles on any drive except the system drive.

As to deleting restore points, I don't really want to do this but I have read that this might be necessary of disk space becomes an issue.

It certainly doesn't comport with the way that system restore works.

System Restore works by tracking changes between restore points. Each restore point only stores new changes to the system (those made since the previous restore point) and this is by design since it minimizes requires space usage and performance interference, and all of the restore points are associated with each other. Restoring the computer from the today's state to three days ago requires each intervening restore point to be present for comparison. For example, if a user wants to restore the computer from today (Monday) to 4 days ago (Friday), System Restore must check the system changes(in the change log) for Monday, Sunday, Saturday and Friday to accurately get back to what the system was on Friday. If a restore point is missing it can't be checked and you get the same error should you try a restore that you would if the restore point was corrupt.

You can manually delete all the restore points EXCEPTING the latest one with the Disk Cleanup utility but that is not the same as "picking and choosing" a selection of points to retain or delete.