Dual Partitions

[Guest]

I have a Toshiba Satellite laptop. I just finished fdisking and used the
Product Recovery cd to reinstall the operating system. Reinstallation
created a c: and d: drive. That was one of the things I wanted to do away
with. What are the advantages of having two drives? I've always found it to
be annoying. Can I delete the d: drive and merge the space with the c: drive?

 

[Jerry]

Two physical drives are better for such things as putting the swap file,
temp files, etc on a separate drive. There is no benefit in using a
different partition on the same drive.

You will have to buy software to merge partitions that have been created and
are in use: Partition Magic is one.

Reinstallation will only do what you want. You should have been given the
option to delete the D: partition at the beginning. If you have a floppy
drive and are using FAT32 you can boot from an WinME boot floppy and run
FDISK to re-do your hard drive to one partition.

 

[Mike Hall \(MS-MVP\)]

Swanie

Many install programs on C: and save data to D:.. in the event that the OS
has to be re-installed, all important stuff is separated away..

One can install programs to D: too, in the event that C: starts to fill up..

A separate partition is easier to back up.. one can just select everything
within the partition for saving to media of choice..

Of course, a hard drive failure will take everything with it, something that
happens all too often these days.. sensible folk have two physical hard
drives installed..

I have two physical drives that contain a total of six partitions.. C: is
the main OS, and D: is a temporary scratch disk.. E: runs Beta OS'es, and F:
has my games installed.. G: is the CDRW, H: is where I keep installation
media like device drivers drivers and all of the silly freebie programs that
I use.. and I: is my main backup/archive drive..

There is also another computer on my network that has two drives, a
partition within one of them being used as a mirror for the I: drive..

Stuff organised in this way is very easy to find.. maybe you should give it
a chance.. the alternative for you is to use a program like Partition Magic
to combine the two parts.. using programs that alter the drive in such major
ways are not without problems in use.. you would have to do a backup of all
of your important stuff, which if on D: would be painlessly easy to find,
and there would be less chance of 'missing' something..