Laptop hard drive split in 2

xzibit

I have an Acer laptop. It has an 80gb hard drive. The wierd thing is, the hard drive is split in half, c: drive and acer: drive. From what I understand the acer drive is for back ups. I don't want, 35gb of back up space!!!! I have created a recovery dvd, and will back up the files I want on cdr, and I want to use the 35gb eventually.

Can I remove this partition? Does it involve formatting the hard drive? As I cannot do that because I don't have a copy of xp.

espresso

There is nothing stopping you using the other partition now. Just use the acer: drive to store your data. The drive could be re-partitioned without formating the drive by using a utility but I really don't see the point as the space is usable now.

f1charlie

Some partitioning tools here:

http://www.thefreecountry.com/utilities/partitioneditors.shtml

Charlie

xzibit

espresso wrote:

There is nothing stopping you using the other partition now. Just use the acer: drive to store your data. The drive could be re-partitioned without formating the drive by using a utility but I really don't see the point as the space is usable now.

Really? So it won't mess with anything? There is an acer utility that comes with the laptop, that includes back-up. Basically, you can do a snapshot of the computer anytime as a back-up, and it saves it to this partition. Then if anything goes wrong, you can boot from this partition to restore the comp. But I have a dvd with the "out-of-the-box" settings on it "hopefully" and will back up important stuff.

So I can just chuck my mp3's over on that drive can I? Wierd thing is, when you click on the c: drive, you get into it and see the folders, but cannot access the acer: drive?

sheedatali

you have to be bit careful about the drives set as backup drive by the manufacturer of the laptop. If you can see that drive in Windows and it has a drive letter associated to it then you might be on the safe side, if that is not the case then i do not recomend saving anything to or using it, typically these backup programs just overwrite everything when you perform back up.

As you mentioned that you have DVD Writer, i think that is better than saving data on hard drive, not as fast as hard drive but much safer option.

espresso

I'm not sure exactly how your machine is configured, perhaps you should read up a bit more but partitioning drives is very common. I have a c: Boot drive (OS and programs) d: Data (storage) and an e: Recovery.

xzibit

sheedatali wrote:

you have to be bit careful about the drives set as backup drive by the manufacturer of the laptop. If you can see that drive in Windows and it has a drive letter associated to it then you might be on the safe side, if that is not the case then i do not recomend saving anything to or using it, typically these backup programs just overwrite everything when you perform back up.

As you mentioned that you have DVD Writer, i think that is better than saving data on hard drive, not as fast as hard drive but much safer option.

Thanks, it's just a bit annoying, as it's advertised as having an 80gb hard drive, when in fact only 35gb of it is useable. Seems pointless to me. Granted, I don't expect to fill the hard drive, as the only thing that takes up space is mp3s, but I will keep them only a few on the harddrive and the rest on dvd's/cdrs.

espresso

xzibit wrote:

Thanks, it's just a bit annoying, as it's advertised as having an 80gb hard drive, when in fact only 35gb of it is useable. Seems pointless to me. Granted, I don't expect to fill the hard drive, as the only thing that takes up space is mp3s, but I will keep them only a few on the harddrive and the rest on dvd's/cdrs.

I don't understand why you think that you have been cheated of disk space and that this partition is unusable. It's your computer to use how you want to use it. Just read up on how Acer Backup is intended to work, to make sure that you understand exactly what your are doing first.

xzibit

espresso wrote:

I don't understand why you think that you have been cheated of disk space and that this partition is unusable. It's your computer to use how you want to use it. Just read up on how Acer Backup is intended to work, to make sure that you understand exactly what your are doing first.

Ok, well I will read up and see if I can delete it.

alikat_3

Your system should run smoothly if you use your main drive for programes & internet access etc & the secondry drive for files. Personally I prefer a partitioned hard drive.

sheedatali

alikat wrote:

Your system should run smoothly if you use your main drive for programes & internet access etc & the secondry drive for files. Personally I prefer a partitioned hard drive.

True, i learnt my lessons in win98 era, if you have one drive, always create at least two partitions, and do not put anything important in the one where you have your OS. XP is much stable and much more recovery options but still MS is a company who always manage to spring a surprise.