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Old January 3rd 10, 01:17 AM posted to microsoft.public.windowsxp.hardware
Shenan Stanley
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Posts: 10,523
Default Hard-drive split?

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?)?


One at a time.

"Why is this?"
Whomever setup your computer decided that is how they wanted to do it. It
could be that one partition contains the 'recovery' or 'restoration'
information - if you have to rebuild your computer from scratch for some
reason, this is the method the OEM (original equipment manufacturer) has
chosen to give you. It could be that the original installer intended for
you to use one partition for Windows and your files and one for installing
programs. Could be they intended you to use one partition for Windows and
installed programs and the other for your data. Could be they heard it was
better to split a large drive into parts. COuld be they were bored and
wanted to see what partitioning did.

"Can I rejoin them?"
Yes - but not with native tools on your Windows XP system (assuming you
posted in the correct group.) You could use a third party utility (there
are a few out there) to take all the space from one partition and give it to
the other - expanding its size. However - depending on why it was initially
done this way - this may/may not break *many* things.

"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?)?"
It's just a partitioning scheme. It does not make the total space of the
physical drive any less - but it can mean you might not have enough space on
a given partition to do something you might want to do. For example - if
you had a 10GB drive and had it partitioned into a 6GB partition and a 4GB
partition (you wouldn't really have 10GB thanks to marketing - but let's
just pretend for now) and you wanted to save 5GB of files to the second
partition - well - you cannot. If you had access to the entire drive - it
only had one partition (yes - even if you have only one usable section of
the physical hard drive - it is still known as partitioned - just into one
piece) of 10GB - and you only had 4.5GB of it used - you could easily copy
the 5GB you wanted to that.

So - without knowing more about what type of computer you have or how it was
initially setup - the true reason of "why" is unknown - but is likely one of
the ones given or some derivative. You can rejoin them - but it's not
recommended and if you have used som much space that is necessary - better
you archive/cleanup or look into just getting a new hard disk drive to store
stuff than attempt anything like rejoining the space without knowing exactly
what you are doing and having a good fallback plan.

--
Shenan Stanley
MS-MVP
--
How To Ask Questions The Smart Way
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html


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