deleting partition

  • Thread starter Thread starter Matty
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M

Matty

I just bought a laptop with Vista Home Premium and when I got home I
discovered that it's 120GB hard-drive had been divided into two equal
partitions - C and D. I would prefer that the whole thing be one. How can
I delete the empty partition D? (I have never dealt with partitions before.)

Thanks for any help.
 
Your d: partition probably has the hidden system backup on it in case of a
disaster.
you can probably shrink it down to a smaller size, so your C: partition can
expand.
Do not copy any other files to it.
You may need a third party partition manager to do this.
One of the best ones is BootIt NG, it is free for 30 days.
 
It turns out that D is not completely empty after all. Windows Explorer
says that 91MB is used. The only thing I can find on it is a hidden folder
called erData. That folder contains only one file called
BurnMachineLog.txt, but this file is blank. Does anybody know what this is?
Is this folder/file important? If I delete partition D will this
folder/file disappear or will it be transferred to C? If the only file I
can find is 0KB in size, what is the 91MB used for?
 
Matty, I think your owners manual tells you how to use the backup to save
your operating system in case of failure.
 
If you can afford it, you can buy a hard drive that plugs into your USB
port.
This is one of the best times to buy as the prices are down,
For example you can buy a 160GB drive for about 60 dollars.

Then leave do: drive alone.

JerryM said:
Matty, I think your owners manual tells you how to use the backup to save
your operating system in case of failure.
Click to expand...
<Snip>
 
I just bought a laptop with Vista Home Premium and when I got home I
discovered that it's 120GB hard-drive had been divided into two equal
partitions - C and D.
Click to expand...

It is onconceivable that they are equal in size. The icon you see in
"Computer" makes them LOOK the same size, but I absolutely know that
they are not.

The D partition is probably about 10GB, give or take a couple. Right
click on it, choose Properties. What does it say (Capacity)?
 
According to their properties (the window with the pie graph) C is
55,989,477,376 bytes and D is 55,660,466,176 bytes. C is already one-third
full, while D seems to be empty except for that mysterious missing 91MB. I
really want to be able to use that space because it is quite a bit. If it
helps, the name of the D partition is "Data" while C is "Main" (I have not
changed them). According to the DiskManager, there is also 7.81GB on the
hard-drive set aside in what it calls EISA Configuration. This space does
not appear to be part of either partition and the DiskManager says that it
is 100% free. It also says that D is 100% free.

There is no mention in the manual about any partition. For an emergency
restore it says to make a back-up DVD. Right now I don't have any blanks
but I will certainly be making a back-up before making any attempt do delete
the partition.

I have had a computer before that had a "ghost" image on a small partition
of several GB in case of a crash but that OS (WinME) was aware of the
existence of the ghost file and made no effort to hide it from me. Vista
seems to think that the D partition is really empty except for that
folder/file that contains nothing and the missing 91MB. If this partition
is for back-up purposes surely that would be mentioned somewhere. Otherwise
what's to prevent me from trying to install something like a large game on
that partition which might over-write the back-up files?

On my old computer I didn't bother to remove the partition it came with
because it was only about 10% of the total and it was obviously being used
for something by the system. I honestly think that the manufacturer simply
partitioned this hard-drive because they thought it would be more convenient
for me, but because I am the sole user I prefer to have one large drive.
Thanks to the responses to my original question I now know how to delete the
partition, but I want to be absolutely sure that doing so will not screw
something up. I suppose I could ask the manufacturer why they partitioned
the hard-drive and if I can safely re-unite it. If anybody knows it should
be them.
 
Matty said:
According to their properties (the window with the pie graph) C is
55,989,477,376 bytes and D is 55,660,466,176 bytes. C is already
one-third full, while D seems to be empty except for that mysterious
missing 91MB. I really want to be able to use that space because it is
quite a bit.
Click to expand...


91Mb "quite a bit"? You have 55 GIGABYTES on the partition. If you're so
concerned about 91 MEGAbytes then you either didn't buy a machine with
sufficient disk space in the first place, or as has been suggested, get an
external HDD...
 
If this partition
is for back-up purposes surely that would be mentioned somewhere. Otherwise
what's to prevent me from trying to install something like a large game on
that partition which might over-write the back-up files?
Click to expand...

Did you get a recovery disc with your computer? If you did, then you
don't have a recovery partition on the machine.

I think you should contact the vendor support and ask them if
deleting that partition will cause any problems. Under normal
circumstances, I would think it wouldn't.

But your system might be configured to USE that partition for data
files (documents, pictures, music).
 
Partition Magic is not compatible with Vista's implementation of NTFS. Use
of it in a Vista installation, particularly for manipulation of the boot or
system volumes, may render the operating system unbootable. Acronis' Disk
Manager or BootIT NG's disk tool are compatible.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org
My thoughts http://rick-mvp.blogspot.com
 
The "quite a bit" was referring to the entire D partition, which some have
suggested I should avoid using in case the system uses it for back-up. I
will not miss the 91MB, although I am curious as to what it is used for.
Surely any system back-up file would be larger than that.
 
Matty said:
The "quite a bit" was referring to the entire D partition, which some have
suggested I should avoid using in case the system uses it for back-up. I
will not miss the 91MB, although I am curious as to what it is used for.
Surely any system back-up file would be larger than that.
Click to expand...

I would have thought so.....maybe you should have a look at your User Manual
to see what's there....
 
No recovery disk came with the computer, which presumably is why the manual
suggested I make one. So far any documents, photos, etc. saved on the
computer have been stored on the C: drive. There doesn't appear to be
anything on D: that wasn't there when it came out of the box. I have
emailed the manufacturer to find out what, if anything, the second partition
is for and whether or not I can safely delete it.
 
Is the computer an Acer? They usually have three partitions, the system and
a data partition of roughly equal size and a hidden recovery partition. Do
not modify the hidden recovery partition. If you use the Acer supplied
backup program (by NTI) it will save your backups to the data partition.
Unless you specifically store data files or install programs to the data
partition (usually D:) it won't be used for anything else. You won't be able
to recover this space using anything built into Vista. You would need to use
a third party program to shrink the partition and allocate the new space to
C: or even delete it altogether and expand C:. Make sure any program you use
for this is Vista compatible. Many aren't.
 
Yes, the computer is an Acer. I apologize for not mentioning that earlier.
Their tech support just confirmed your message - leave the smaller recovery
partition alone but D can be deleted and C expanded if I wish. They said D
is just there for me to store data. Then in the event that C crashes and
needs to be reformatted, the data on D should be safe. I was not aware that
it was possible to format only one partition on a hard-drive. I always
thought that formatting wiped the entire drive and all partitions on it. It
would have been nice if Acer had mentioned somewhere why they partitioned
the hard-drive and that there was a hidden recovery partition. The
documentaion for the computer doesn't mention either.

I have a large flash-drive to which I back-up all my data anyway, so it
doesn't really need to be stored on a seperate partition. I prefer to
back-up data on a seperate storage device in case the computer is lost,
stolen or destroyed, when having the data on its own partition would be of
no help.

Will Vista's DiskManager not delete/expand partitions? It does mention
delete and expand when right-clicking on a partition, and someone else did
suggest using this utility for that purpose.
 
My experience with the Acre laptops is that the disk manager in Vista can't
do that. It is quite limited in it's abilities to expand/shrink partitions.
It only works in limited circumstances. I use Acronis Disk Director to do
this. You could certainly try the built in disk manager first. The worst
that would happen is it wouldn't work and you'd be left with two partitions.
The procedure would be this.

Create two sets of the Acer recovery disks.

Backup everything on the computer. I would make two complete backups. The
Acer backup program can do this to DVD.

Delete the D: partition in disk manager.

See if disk manager can expand C: to use the unallocated space that used to
be D:

--
Kerry Brown
MS-MVP - Windows Desktop Experience: Systems Administration
http://www.vistahelp.ca/phpBB2/
http://vistahelpca.blogspot.com/
 
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