Brian V wrote:
Inside my computer tower is one hard-drive. But I have two in my computer. It
is like the drive is seperated into a C: and D: drive. Why is this? Can I
rejoin them? If they were split, does it take away from the amount of space
there is there (say it's 400gB would this situation make it 350Gb one has
access to. The other 50Gb being a buffer of some kind?)?
If this is a pre-built computer, with a recovery partition on it, don't
touch it until you understand a little more about the setup. Some people
get all excited by the opportunity to expand C: and wipe out the only
copy of Windows provided with their computer. There may be a hidden
partition, with your recovery software in it. Check the computer instruction
manual, for the procedure that covers burning a "recovery CD" or
"recovery DVD". If you prepare your recovery media in advance, you'll
be prepared for the day that the hard drive dies on you.
This tool will display the four primary partition entries on a hard drive.
A hard drive can have more than four partitions. One of the partition
entries can have a special entry that indicates more logical partitions
exist. This tool doesn't show any logical partitions. I use only
primary ones on my machine (more convenient).
PTEDIT32 for Windows
ftp://ftp.symantec.com/public/englis...s/PTEDIT32.zip
PTEDIT32 screenshot
http://www.vistax64.com/attachments/...0-dell-tbl.gif
You can see in the sample screen shot, there are three partitions on the hard
drive being displayed. Type "07" or "0C" might be considered "normal"
partitions. The ones marked "DE" and "DB" are different. "DE" is something
that Dell invented. Each manufacturer can hide different things in the partition
table, so it is a good idea to do your research first, so you don't erase something
you'll want later. At least one computer manufacturer uses an HPA (Host
Protected Area), which you can't even see in that display.
If you were building your own computer, you wouldn't do anything nearly
so complicated.
There is a table of partition types here, to help you decode them. Using
a single byte would seem to have been a mistake.
http://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/partition...n_types-1.html
Paul