SMART Error 301

[1101]

Can anyone see any fish-hooks here, like ramifications of heaving the Recovery and Tools partitions?

worst case senario
There might be a non standard bootloader(for the recovery partition) &/or the partitions may all be out of order (seen that ), so bootup might look for Windows on the previous non standard partition: its fixable.
Also, there is normally a Windows 'system reserved' partition. Make sure you get that one.

It may be easiest to image as is (proportionally) and then manually remove the 2 unwanted partitions, then just increase the size of the C: last.
Perhaps run CCleaner first to clear out temps & reduce total 'data' size.

[linw]

Thanks WT and 1101 for helpful replies.

The test C: image restore to the spare went fine but I had to reboot to the Macrium PE disk to get it to fix the booting. After that it boots and runs fine.

Then I found it was riddled with PUPs and a Trojan downloader or two. Thank goodness for MBAM! The faster machines tend to disguise the infections as they don't suffer as much from getting bogged down.

Uninstalled every HP prog I could find. The fact that nothing broke says it all about the crap these companies install. Never figured why they do it.

I got the size down to 52GB but 1101 you reminded me to try ccleaner as well. It came up with another 2.9GB. Every bit welcome!

Interesting and educational exercise, anyway.

And the SSD has been ordered! It's going to end up a quick little machine.

[wainuitech]

Want some more space ?? Run TFC http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/download/tfc/ It gets more than Ccleaner

[linw]

Only another 109MB! Now at 45.6GB. Good enough - leaves approx 75GB head room. That'll do.