Really really daft computer question!

pinkie_pie

Why does my laptop have two drives?! It has a C 'vista' drive with 116gb (fair bit used) and an E 'data' drive with 115gb. (only 5 gb used)

Why???

Marty_J

Your single drive is partitioned in two. The E drive probably contains the data for restoring your computer.

John_Gray

Often the laptop manufacturer provides the second 'half' of your hard disk for backups. Some people use it for all their large data files (videos, photos, etc). Other people just never realise it's there!

Meadows

Mine has three drives C,D & E
C - Main Drive
D - Drive where I tend to store a lot of my files, mainly media, stops taking up space on the main drive.
E - Recovery Drive

esuhl

And you can compete in the "highest number of partitions" competition if you like. Here's my list:

C - Windows XP
D - Personal data
E - Music
F - Junk (temporary files, ISOs, virtual machines, drive images)
G - Windows XP Recovery (2nd installation for troubleshooting)
H - Windows page file
I - Backup 1 (backup of data & music files)
J - Backup 2 (backup of the backup)
/ - Zenwalk Linux OS
/home - Linux personal files
N/A - Linux swap partition

And on my new PC, I'll probably have all the above and an additional partitions for Windows 7, Slackware 64-bit and another swap partiton.

macman

11? I think I'm suffering from 'partition envy'...
OP, you may have two disks showing up, (C & E) but remember you only have one physical disk, so in the event of disk failure, you will still lose the lot. So back up to an external device.

pinkie_pie

Okay so my total memory is 230-odd gb then? I didn't know if it was some sort of mirror/back up type thing.

SO it's absolutely fine to move stuff over there to store then? Awesome

def losing the partition competition I'm happy with my two as didn't know there was more than one!

Meepster

You'll probably find you also have a "D" drive, it's just hidden in Windows. This will contain your installation backup data from the manufacturer

AirCooledHeaven

esuhl wrote: »

And you can compete in the "highest number of partitions" competition if you like. Here's my list:

C - Windows XP
D - Personal data
E - Music
F - Junk (temporary files, ISOs, virtual machines, drive images)
G - Windows XP Recovery (2nd installation for troubleshooting)
H - Windows page file
I - Backup 1 (backup of data & music files)
J - Backup 2 (backup of the backup)
/ - Zenwalk Linux OS
/home - Linux personal files
N/A - Linux swap partition

And on my new PC, I'll probably have all the above and an additional partitions for Windows 7, Slackware 64-bit and another swap partiton.

esuhl, you certainly win the MSE Partition Geek award

pinkie_pie

mwilletts wrote: »

You'll probably find you also have a "D" drive, it's just hidden in Windows. This will contain your installation backup data from the manufacturer

Clicking on the E drive it has HDDRecovery file so possibly not? But I'm okay to use the rest of the space yes?

Meepster

Yup, space is space at the end of the day, no matter where it is...