Need help dleting restore points on full drive (1.1.127)

[joe78]

Hello, I'm trying to help someone clean all restore points off a 200 GB Maxtor 1Touch external HDD (Retrospect Express HD won't do it).

 

Problem was the drive was full and it wasn't doing the automatic maintenance of deleting old restore points. I tried to manually delete restore points, Retrospect Express HD worked for 7 - 8 hours and the restore points were still there when it finished. So then I deleted the directory "Retrospect Restore Points". When viewing the drive with Windows Explorer, it shows a capacity of 190 GB with 170 GB available. So apparently, the hidden 'system file' or directory called "recycler" has about 20 gigs of files in it.

 

I'm running a de-frag on the drive right now and can see that it is moving a bunch of .rdb files.

 

First question is: Is it normal for there to be about 20GB of files in the hidden 'system files' on the drive when there are no restore points?

 

Is it safe to delete all the files in the "Recycler" directory? If it is okay to delete them, do I just do a plain old highlight and delete via Windows Explorer?

 

If a reformat is recommended, I would appreciate instructions (or a link to instructions) on how to do that and get Retrospect Express HD running again afterwards.

 

The pc is running Win XP sp2 or 3 (haven't checked). Also, I'm helping out remotely via LogMeIn.

 

Thanks for any help.

 

Joe