"C" drive low. How do I put two drives together?

R

remember

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My "C" drive is nearly full and I have some other drive which is pretty much totally empty in a "D" drive, but obviously doesnt look like a hard drive. (Please see att. photo).

The "D" drive has 16.9 GB's free of a total 17.1GB's and again, my normal looking "C" drive is nearly totally full.

Im sorry I have no idea what it means or how to correct it. But for some reason, its not very easy to save files in the "D" drive automatically and Im getting constant messages about my hardrive needing more space.

I don't even know what the "D" drive is really since it doesn't look like a normal "C" drive "hardrive" icon, so I have no idea what to do about it.

If it is part of my hardrive, is there some way I can put them together, so I dont keep getting these "low hardrive space" messages? How do I do that? and what exactly is my drive "D" at the moment? I know so very little about computers, any help is always appreciated.

Woops, didn't realize picture was going to be so big, I wanted it to just be a little picture that could expand when you click on it, but now you can all see I really know very little about computers.
 
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You are not the only one receiving an Acer laptop with two partitions found on the hard drive. The exact same question is asked at http://ask.metafilter.com/22476/Combining-and-changing-partitions

You will first have to delete the D partition and extend it with a Linux partitioning tool known GParted live for cd. The XP installer won't help you do that as outlined at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/886986/?sd=RMVP

The Gnome Partition Editor is first downloaded as an iso image that needs to burned to a cd-r. A free to keep tryout of BurnOn can be found at http://www.burnworld.com/burnoncddvd/ if you can't burn iso disk images with the burning programs you already have or lack. The icon refers to the hidden recovery partition where system restore are mainly found.

GParted can be found at http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=115843&package_id=173828 Note the 0.3.3.0 platform independent version(3rd one down) is the latest that hasn't been seeing problems. The 0.3.3.5 fails to start up when entering the startx command for the auto display configuration explaining why a newer 0.3.3.6 version(untried here) was just released.

Once you have GParted burned to disk you simply boot the system with the cd and press the enter until you see the option for the screen resolution which is 1024x768 by default. The next screen will show the two partitions seen on the hard drive where you highlight the D or hda2 and click the remove option followed by clicking apply. When the scrolling bar is finished you can increase the size of the primary by clicking and holding on the up arrow seen for the partition's total space.

Ignore the space before and note the space after being the same as the D partitio you just deleted. When pressing the up arrow you will see the D amount decrease as the primary C increases to the maximum.
 
Holy Wow

I almost cant get past the fact that you knew I have a Acer laptop-I never mentioned it anywhere. Anyway- your explanation is hardcore. I'll have to read it about 100 more times.

Im actually more glad then you know to see you mention Linux. I told someone the other day I really like computers, blah, blah, and I dont understand why there is such a big difference between Macs and Non-Macs and all the hub bub about the so-called difference in their capabilites, and conflicts when trying to run applications and web browsers that are less than compatable with each or both, and basically, he recommended me to check out Linux.
Now Ive got more motivation to check it out.
I dont really understand much more of what you wrote, which is why I'll have to read it all a few more times. Anyway thanks a lot, this all seems very complicated, but makes me feel like this is totally advanced. I feel like Im on my way to becoming a computer genius,. . . in my dreams.
 
Well the tools mentioned are effective. Instead of paying out for a retail product you do the same thing for 0% $$$ well except for the effort and a blank cd-r anyways. :P That's a less wordy guide then writing a book however. :eek: egads! When a new sata drive was added in along with the two ide drives here I had to remove the storage partition on the second drive for the single primary when Vista wouldn't install to it for some reason.

The sata was supposed to be "for storage and backup only"? :confused: not so! XP Pro got replaced by Vista and ended up on the new sata. GParted "ssssstretcheddd" the primary out and then Vista took over. such is life. :D
 
I almost cant get past the fact that you knew I have a Acer laptop-I never mentioned it anywhere
Click to expand...
It says ACERDATE in the screen shot you posted ;)

You might be able to use ccleaner to clean out your temp files and things to free up some space so you don't get those messages anymore. I don't know what 'ACERDATA' is, the icon kind of looks like a USB drive with a wireless signal above it.
 
At first it looks like a flash drive more then anything until doing a little research on Acer drives. That's actually the factory made recovery partition. The icon is there for a reason most likely seen in the user manual for the system itself. That's the way things are done on prebuilds. They do it "their way" while you sit around and wonder.

Meawhile the latest GParted 0.3.3.5 and 0.3.3.6 versions require that you first mount them where the independent platform versions simply require you to keep pressing the enter keys to the main gui. The two versions that will easily work are the 0.3.3.0 and 0.3.2.0. Once you remove the D you are all set to increase the primary to the total amount of drive space available.
 
I need more time

To PCeye,

Well, believe it or not Im still trying to really understand what you said. I mean really understand it, besides yet having followed your links and totally read those through and understood them, when I read all this stuff, I have to use wikipedia or webopedia to understand a lot of the terms, but I want to understand it all, so its just going to take me a little more time than the usual etc. . .

But when you say,

"When a new sata drive was added in along with the two ide drives here I had to remove the storage partition on the second drive for the single primary when Vista wouldn't install to it for some reason."

I assume you are talking about your own similar problem? because there are about another 15 pages of info just on Serial ATA at wiki, which needless to say is going to take me even more time to read and more importantly, really understand it, not to mention downloading the new Vista, but its all very interesting. I like it a lot. I just cant help really wanting to fully understand as much as I can.

At the moment I have just one question reagrding the steps for fixing all this, but Im pretty sure I'll have more during the weekend.. When you say use a CD-R disc, can I use a CD-RW?

To Cromewell,

I use CCleaner every chance I get, especially since Im so low on space in my "normal"? "C" HDD. But Im glad to hear that you use it too. I feel much better knowing that you and more than just myself use it. (I find it strange how programs like that are free, especially since I dont know of any others like it) I must of got it from this website, otherwise, without this forum, I would barely even know what a computer is. . .
 
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Upon trying to install Vista to a second partition on the second ide hard drive here something prevented for an unknown reason. That was a problem I ran into with the new version of Windows. My headache there! :eek: An ide drive is known as a Parallel ATA also seen as PATA or EIDE. You plug the flat ribbon type cable into that since you cd drive is also another type of ide drive.

For creating what they call a "bootable cd" that's one you can boot the system with like the Windows installation disk you would use either a cd-r which the "R" stands for read only. Anything you burn to it stays on it. An rw is a rewriteable disk you can erase for dragging and copying files to later.

A cd with an iso image burned to it is like a self contained hard drive. In fact a good number of distributions(different versions) of Linux and other operating systems are found in live for cd or dvd versions. You simply boot the system with the cd or dvd to see that load up. In fact a live distro is often used to gain access to a drive that Windows can't see or even get onto. GParted works the same by booting from the cd with downloaded iso image burned to the cd. You do have to have a program that burns iso images however to get that done. BurnOn's free version has done well so far.
 
First step, How do I delete the D partition?

By the way, for some reason now. My C drive icon of the harddrive is now on the D drive and the USB thumb drive icon is on the C drive. Dont know how that happened, but please tell me if makes any difference for trying to put the 2 together.
 
to delete drive D, try BOOTING into DOS and typing FDISK.
you need a boot disk to do this, or a 98 cd.
once your there, you can delete partitions.
WHATEVER YOU DO:
dont delete the C: partition, otherwise your screwed
 
You can't merge the partitions without 3rd party software (like partition magic) unless you have them formatted as dynamic disks. You can delete both and recreate them as one 'big' one but you'll lose all your data. There's a chance you'll lose it anyway when merging the partitions though
 
How do I boot into DOS?

To Cromewell,

What about all the stuff that PCeye said? It seems like what your saying conflicts with what he is saying? But then again at this point I have no &^%*^%*&^h idea. Im totally lost.

I downloaded all the programs he told me to record on to CD and then start the computer with that CD in and pressing the enter button and nothing happened. So, can I just get the easiest version possible to try and do this?
 
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When downloading GParted whch version did you go with? The screen shot here will show some of the newer versions that have been added. Hopefully it wasn't one of those since a proceedure for mounting the iso image on a virtual drive has to be done first with the newest releases. The 0.3.3.0 version is about the fourth link down from the top as seen in the image here. http://img186.imageshack.us/img186/8568/gparted0330live4cdgp1.jpg

it can be a little touchy the first time if you saw a good burn with the 0.3.3.0 or earlier version(lower on the page). When first booted from you come upto a rather basic command prompt were you simply press the enter key there to see the program start loading. It looks quite a bit like a gold or green color screen like Windows where you will note the odd shaped cursor. The next 4 or 5 screens reached you press enter instead of making changes for the defaults to be loaded. One will be changing from 24 to 32bit. Just simply ignore that and go to the 1024x768 or 1280x1024 option screen for changing the default 1024x768 resolution there.

Apparently some of the bugs found with booting with the newer releases have been corrected for a just released beta version now available at http://gparted.free.fr/beta/ The word about this is found in the descriptions on various releases seen on the page at http://gparted.sourceforge.net/news.php?alles=alles I would stay with the 0.3.3.0 version and use a cd-rs only since you have to make up a bootable cd. rewritable disks generally won't work for something like this. This isn't msdos found with GParted by any means. It's a free Linux partitioning tool.
 
Im going crazy

Im going crazy over all this.

Originally I downloaded the latest version, whatever it was when this thread started.

Now I downloaded the version 0.3.3.0 onto a CD-R. I restarted the laptop and nothing.

When I open the CD from My PC, it opens in a program called "Roxio Easy CD Creator"

I dont know what the hell Im doing. Im getting totally frustrated. What am I doing wrong?
 
If you have Roxio Easy Media Creator installed it has it's own auto prompting since it auto loads along with Windows. due to "TDriver.exe" errors that used to come up on occasion I simply disabled all of it's items in the startup and services groups found in the msconfig utility. If you used Roxio to burn the iso onto the cd-r it didn't make a bootable cd out of it.

BurnOn works great for this since it will burn the iso image as a bootable cd since it has that option when using the burn wizard. With traces of Roxio on the cd-r that can easily explain why you are seeing the prompts. I still only use Roxio at this point for data dvds not anything dealing with Linux distros or the partitioning tool there. I'll even post the link again for it. http://www.burnworld.com/burnoncddvd/
 
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