is this a partitioned hard drive?

[nobber]

i am working on a friends puter and found out that it is registering two separate drives , d and e drive i think it was.

my friend was complaining that the computer was running out of space. i had a look and d drive was nearly full (25 gb) but it also said (when looking in my computer) that e drive had 49 gb left and was pretty much empty.

there is nothing plugged into the laptop , it is running windows xp and is around 10 years old.

why would it be showing two seperate drives in my computer?
and if it is a partition how can i get rid of it and just have one drive?

also , if d drive was full would it not then start to fill e drive?

is there any way i can find out for sure what is going on?

[Matt_300tdi90]

It sounds like a separate partition, you need to open the disk management utility info here (http://www.theeldergeek.com/disk_management.htm) to check though, it shows each physical disk and the partitions on each.

You cannot combine the two partitions together without losing the data unfortunately so you will need to backup the data on both the drives and then delete both partitions in disk management and create one big one from the space.

I would only do this if the operating system is stored on a separate drive like C though otherwise things get complicated, it these two partitions ( d and e) only contain data like music or photos then it will be easy.
(http://www.theeldergeek.com/disk_management.htm)

[nobber]

aah , i think its c and d , not d and e. i will check tomorrow.
the operating system is on the 25 gb drive.

i was thinking about re formatting the drive anyway as the puter is running slow and i doubt its ever been done before in the ten years or so that its been around.

[Lighting90]

It is sometimes good to have the operating system on it's own, but you have to be displined to ensure you do not put data or additional software into that paritition.

Windows software though is a pain as it puts my docs etc on the same drive as the OS.

[nobber]

It is sometimes good to have the operating system on it's own, but you have to be displined to ensure you do not put data or additional software into that paritition.

Windows software though is a pain as it puts my docs etc on the same drive as the OS.

thats what is happening on tis one , everything goes into the os side of the partition.

[Lighting90]

The laptop I have is split, but I store all data on the D partition, this means that the C drive is clean, and used only by the OS, and means things like the swap file system is not compromised and slowing down the machine... :)

But it does require effort to do this... and knowing what you put on one drive or the other, for instance, a game, I will install on D drive, but something like Word, or Cad programs I will put on the C drive to help them preform better...

[wylie_eyed]

it's not that difiicult to repartition the drive whilst still in operation, but if you're a bit reluctant to do it there are plenty of utilities that make life easier a lot of them are free!! however from what you've said it's probably a good idea to do a complete reformat(not a quick one) and reinstall the os, saying that the price of hard drives is very low why not just get a new one and go with that and use the old one as a slave, maybe doing regular back ups to it?

[mallee59]

You could just transfer/copy some of the files/folders from C to D, nothing from the windows directory though. If there are icons/shortcuts on the desktop just bear in mind that they will have to be changed to 'point' to D and not C.
Partitioning is done to keep data safe and easy to manage usually, so if either crashed then that partition can be formatted and not all data lost
mallee

[wylie_eyed]

You could just transfer/copy some of the files/folders from C to D, nothing from the windows directory though. If there are icons/shortcuts on the desktop just bear in mind that they will have to be changed to 'point' to D and not C.
Partitioning is done to keep data safe and easy to manage usually, so if either crashed then that partition can be formatted and not all data lost
mallee

or use two drives :)

[John_P]

If you realy want to merge the partitions there's plenty of free or shareware windows partitioning soft out there

Google something like "free on the fly partitioning software"

or look at site like http://www.thefreecountry.com/utilities/partitioneditors.shtml for some info.

When I first got into computers back in the dos only days I only had fdisk and format commands :D
even today I still use them at time even though windows disk management can handle all everyday requirements.

Now you can convert, resize, delete, create, make active etc from within windows or from bootable cds with gui s with most of the myriad of software from the likes of paragon, symantec, visopsys, easeus, acronis and many many more.

John