Two Hard Disk Drives?

J

JTse

New Member
I registered on this forum solely for this question. I have asked many game-based forums, but I can't get a definite answer.

My Situation:
I bought this Lenovo Laptop and I have two Hard Disk Drives; [C:] & [D:], I never thought it would become a problem. However, over the year(s), many of the programs I have installed into [D:] automatically install stuff (like updates and such) into the [C:] as it is "the" default. My [C:] has become full many many times and I'm lost on what to do.
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My Thoughts:
Someone on a forum told me that I don't have two Hard Drives, just a split Hard Drive. He told me to delete [D:] and to expand the [C:]. At that time, I had a lot of important information and I had no way to back it up, so I did the usual and cleaned up [C:] by using Advanced System Care and disk clean-up. I don't know if he's right or not, I don't want to open up my laptop because I'm a complete buffoon around technology. At this point, I'm willing to delete almost all my stuff and start anew.

Questions:
  1. How can I check if I have two "Hard Drives" without physically opening my Laptop?
  2. Is deleting [D:] advisable?
  3. Is there a different option than doing this?
  4. Is there way to back-up my stuff in [D:] without having a external hard drive?

I hope this question gets answered and I haven't wasted anyone's time. Thanks for reading.
~Cheers

EDIT: Ah, I found the word, partitioning, is my hard drive partitioned?

Extra Information I'm randomly giving:
I guess it is?
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You do only have one drive in your PC, your story is very common. You can look in the device manager under Disc drives and it will list your physical drives. Partitioning your drive doesn't offer any performance advantages and only creates problems like the ones your running into. My advace would be to join the two partitions together so you have one partition on the drive.

I can't stress enough though to back up your data. Things can go wrong with partitioning. Burn the data on the D drive to DVD or buy an external USB HDD (less then $100 US) and copy the data to that.

This the basic idea what you want to do:

1. Back up data on "D" drive. Also back up any documents and setting you have on the "C" drive.

2 Use a partition program to join the "C" and "D" paritions. Be sure to select the "C" partition as the main partition.

Note: Be sure to use a non-destructive partition program or you will lose all your data.

Without knowing your OS and what program you want to use to do the partitioning I can't give you more detailed instructions.
 
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lawson_jl said:
You do only have one drive in your PC, your story is very common. You can look in the device manager under Disc drives and it will list your physical drives. Partitioning your drive doesn't offer any performance advantages and only creates problems like the ones your running into. My advace would be to join the two partitions together so you have one partition on the drive. .
Click to expand...

At one time - several years ago - I thought conventional wisdom was that partitioned hard drives ran faster than non-partitioned ones.

Was that a farse to begin with - or has technology gotten rid of that advantage?
 
I like to partition my drives, especialy since I have two 500gb in my machine. Technology has pretty much out dated the partitioning. But to me it is much easy to defrag and other things to a partition drive than wait longer on a non-partition drive. But, why would you make your c: drive so small. At least, cut it in half, same gb's on 2 drives.
 
Way back in the pre NTFS days the cluster size was dependent on the size of the drive/partition. So if you took a 2 GB drive and partitioned it into a couple partitions you would get a smaller cluster size and there for more efficient storage. I don't think it really ever mattered the most we are talking is a few Megabytes at best. But hey we know how ue geeks are.

The reason I don't like partitioning a drive today is the extra wear and tear it puts on the drive. Your making a lot more work for your drive having to access data on all differnt parts when you have more then one partition. The head will constantly be swinging back and forth to access each partition. Now the question is will this make the drive fail sooner. The answear is yes, but will it fail while your still using it?
 
Alright, Its a partition and I'm thinking of putting everything in C: to D: and then deleting C: and renaming D: to C:.
Is this a good idea?

Problems:
-I can't back-up D: in any way.
-When I shrink D: in computer management, I still can't extend C: even though there is like 20 free gbs of free space.

P.S. Its 32-bit.
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~Cheers

EDIT: This is bs...I can't delete C: drive or extend it, wtf?
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As C is your system drive, you won't be able to do what you want to do. You can't change the drive letter of your system drive and if you start moving files around your system won't boot. Your best bet now is to back up any data to a cd/dvd and reinstall windows with only one partition.
 
don't use windows partition tools. disk management is painful at best. ea*se*us partition master home 3,5 (as in the other reply i just made :) is easy, fast and FREE. it is recommended that you back up first, but if you are feeling lucky you can shrink D: by 50 GB and then increase C: by the same margin. dragging and dropping in this program. then it restarts your machine and does the actual resizing. 30 minutes or so. safe. fun. time for pie.
 
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