Windows XP hard drive question

[Guest]

I some time ago I upgraded my wife's XP Home to XP Pro so I could help her
out remotely. I have now discovered that she has a C drive and a D drive both
with Windows system data on them. I cannot recall putting in an additional
hard drive on her computer but at my age I could have and forgotten about it.

Is there a way to deternine in Disk Management if the D drive has been
partitioned or if it is physically a different drive, without actually
removing the case and looking? I hope I have explained myself here adequately.

 

[Charlie]

start/all programs/accessories/system tools/system information/storage/disks

 

[Doug Knox MS-MVP]

If the computer came with XP installed, there is likely a "restore partition". This partition is usually hidden, and is formatted FAT32. It contains what would be the contents of a recovery CD/DVD, and is used to put the computer back to its "out of box" state.

 

[Guest]

Thanks for your help. Apparantly I did install an additional hard drive on
her computer.

 

[Tecknomage]

I some time ago I upgraded my wife's XP Home to XP Pro so I could help her
out remotely. I have now discovered that she has a C drive and a D drive both
with Windows system data on them. I cannot recall putting in an additional
hard drive on her computer but at my age I could have and forgotten about it.

Is there a way to deternine in Disk Management if the D drive has been
partitioned or if it is physically a different drive, without actually
removing the case and looking? I hope I have explained myself here adequately.

If you're talking about finding out what type of drive D: is, use
Device Manager (Right-click My Computer, Manage, Device Manager on
left pane) and expand the "Disk drives" tree in the right pane.

Both you drives should be listed. Right-click the each drive and
select Properties to see more info.

As for partitioning, Disk Management _does_ show if it is partitioned.
If it has never been partitioned you would automatically get a drive
initialization wizard and after that the display for the drive would
say the space was free or unused meaning unpartitioned. If it is
partitioned, the display would say what is was partitioned for (FAT,
NTFS, etc.), volume name, size.





==== Tecknomage ====
Ah...Amerikanski humor.
Is most funny.
We bomb now.