I've got Windows 7 and on the "drives" list there's one called "D" Recovery.

I noticed it's steadily filling up and it now says there's 1.69 GB free out of 13.7 GB total. I've looked at the details of what's in the D Drive and nothing looks familiar nor, do I have any idea what I can -and cannot- do with the contents of it.

What happens when the D Drive reaches 100% capacity and if necessary, how can I free up more space? I've also checked for advice and some of it warns against attempting to do anything with a D Drive.

 

Are you sure the D drive is actually filing up? Usually, a recovery drive is a small partition on your hard drive that allocates just enough space to hold an OS image that can be used to reinstall the OS if needed so it will look like a full drive. It is not usually used for anything else - every one I've seen is write protected.

You can sometimes use Disk Management in Control Panel to resize partitions but unless you have another recovery image on a bootable drive, I wouldn't mess with it. A factory recovery image will have all of the drivers etc. for your particular. Dell and a few others frequently have proprietary hardware that might not run with a generic version of Windows.

 

I've checked my D Drive for the past two years and the bar graph keeps increasing and it also says that the amount of free space is decreasing.

One part of D is for the Hewlett Packard recovery, but the other part is for something that I don't understand.

 

Sounds like the system recovery restore points are being written to your D drive.

I'd disable SYSTEM RESTORE to it. Go to CONTROL PANEL, SYSTEM, SYSTEM PROTECTION on left side, select D: on the bottom pane and CONFIGURE to turn it off.

 

/me wouldn't disable, change to the c drive.

and don't lose sleep on the lack of space on recovery partition

 

Your D recovery disk is what some manufacturers give you, instead of a windows installation or emergency disk.

Ignore it. It will take care of itself. Some might rotate up to 3 images, (and other files) as previously stated.