Viewing 32 posts - 1 through 32 (of 32 total)
  • New laptop has 2 hard drives. Why?
  • paulosoxo
    Free Member

    Do I keep my operating system on one, and saved stuff on the other? or fill one, and then start to put stuff on the other or what?

    At the moment, one seems to be not doing anything

    footflaps
    Full Member

    Do you mean one HD with two partitions?

    paulosoxo
    Free Member

    It seems to be two HDD’s New to vista, but they’re named c and d

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    footflaps
    Full Member

    I think you’ll find it’s just two partitions on the same physical drive.

    Do with them what you will.

    Personally I put personal files on the D drive and just use the C for applications.

    simonfbarnes
    Free Member

    It seems to be two HDD’s New to vista, but they’re named c and d

    probably 2 partitions on the same drive.

    paulosoxo
    Free Member

    Just it says 2 drives at the top, so are they just partitions?

    Clicky for bigger

    davidtaylforth
    Free Member

    Yes, probably two partitions. Put all your files on the D drive and use the C for apps. If something goes wrong, you can format the C drive without losing all your files as they’ll be on the D drive.

    paulosoxo
    Free Member

    So can I move the My documets and all that to D?

    samuri
    Free Member

    yep. Don’t just drag them though, right click on my documents, click properties and then the move button to move my documents where you want it.

    GrahamS
    Full Member

    May possibly be two HDDs. Was looking at a Fujitsu laptop the other day that had two drives and a RAID controller.

    But at that size I’d say they are partitions. Look in Disk Manager to find out.

    zaskar
    Free Member

    Larger storage too.

    mikewsmith
    Free Member

    It may have 2 hd, some of the larger alienwares have 2 drive bays, for a bit of fun replace the drive with the OS on with a big CF card in a hdd adaptor will boot like brown stuff off the shovel and keep all the other stuff on the second drive

    dr_adams
    Free Member

    Yes, looks to be two partitions, normal reason for this is that you put all your personal stuff on drive D and then if anything goes wrong and you need to reinstall windows you can do so and it will wipe drive C and leave D alone and so reduces risk of loosing important stuff.

    mikewsmith
    Free Member

    It may have 2 hd, some of the larger alienwares have 2 drive bays, for a bit of fun replace the drive with the OS on with a big CF card in a hdd adaptor will boot like brown stuff off the shovel and keep all the other stuff on the second drive

    mikewsmith
    Free Member

    It may have 2 hd, some of the larger alienwares have 2 drive bays, for a bit of fun replace the drive with the OS on with a big CF card in a hdd adaptor will boot like brown stuff off the shovel and keep all the other stuff on the second drive

    coffeeking
    Free Member

    Should be similar on Vista, but on XP you do right click on my computer then
    =>manage>storage>disk management

    This will present you with a table and a diagram of how your drives are partitioned and which drive letters occur on which physical address.

    surfer
    Free Member

    Are you staying up all night just to ensure you dont miss anything? 😉

    aphex_2k
    Free Member

    Screenshot shows ACER as C drive and DATA as D. I bought an Acer lappy for my wife and that was configured the same. 2 partitions on the same physical drive.

    coffeeking
    Free Member

    Are you staying up all night just to ensure you dont miss anything?

    Nope, I had an early night on saturday night and that totally buggered up my sleep pattern so it was 5:45 before I got to sleep 🙂

    Screenshot shows ACER as C drive and DATA as D. I bought an Acer lappy for my wife and that was configured the same. 2 partitions on the same physical drive.

    Screenshot doesn’t suggest whether it’s two seperate drives or one partitioned, it just states theres two drive letters of a set size each? However 111Gb is an odd drive size so I suggest 225 (close to the sum of the two) is more likely so I agree its likely to be 2 partitions.

    aphex_2k
    Free Member

    It’s probably a 250gb drive and the 25gb is lost in formatting two partitions on it.

    coffeeking
    Free Member

    Yup, that was my thought, just seems like a lot of loss – I cant remember whats typical for that sort of size drive 🙂

    aphex_2k
    Free Member

    Depends on the file system. It’s about right though.

    500gb formats down to about 464 and a Tb formats down to about 928gb. (Personal experience) using NTFS

    Probably worse if you use FAT32.

    Sandwich
    Full Member

    <spinal tap> Cos it’s one better </spinal tap> 😀

    takisawa2
    Full Member

    for a bit of fun replace the drive with the OS on with a big CF card in a hdd adaptor will boot like brown stuff off the shovel and keep all the other stuff on the second drive

    Would that actually work then…?

    flyingmonkeycorps
    Full Member

    Drive sizes are always different in real life to what they are advertised as. Manufacturers takes one gb to be 1000mb, Windows (correctly I believe) takes it as 1024.

    paulosoxo
    Free Member

    Thanks for the help all!

    CountZero
    Full Member

    just to complicate things a bit, the biggest capacity iPods have two harddrives in: the 160Gb Classics had two 80Gb, for example.

    Kahurangi
    Full Member

    There’ll also be some space lost for the hidden recovery data partition.

    Put your data on the secondary partition for the reasons stated above. Also back up all your files as you’re moving them over, it’s an easy time for stuff to get lost.

    twinklydave
    Full Member

    it’s just partitions on the same hdd

    mine’s almost exactly the same

    paulosoxo
    Free Member

    Ta.

    paulosoxo
    Free Member

    Right, it looks like it’s 1 drive with 4 partitions.

    I have an external HDD that’s on our wireless network that I can back up to. I can’t move the PAUL folder onto D, just the individual folders in it, can I make the C: partition bigger?

    coffeeking
    Free Member

    Yup, 2 large, 2 small. Thought it looked a bit odd for 2 partitions, was just a hunch though.

    You’d need something like Partition Magic to change partition sizes.

    Taki…

    Yes you could use a CF card but the sizes are very limited and it’ll keel over after less time than a harddrive due to flash memory having a lower lifespan of writes.

Viewing 32 posts - 1 through 32 (of 32 total)

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