Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Lupin6]

Hi guys. Yeah, more computer-related things. I ended up getting a new laptop with better components from Amazon. Totally new, factory settings, all of that. But I noticed something odd. The 1TB hard drive was divided in two, a C Drive that was 104 GB and a "D: DATA" drive that was 931 GB. The DATA drive had nothing on it.

This discovery was especially weird for me since, while I've heard of partitioning hard drives, I'd never done it before and I'd certainly never seen a laptop at factory settings come with an already partitioned drive.

I know some people like having a partitioned drive like that, and there are certain advantages to it, but personally, I prefer having the C Drive whole, and not bothering to partition. The split is so wide too. Now I looked online and I found this: https://www.wikihow.com/Unpartition-a-Hard-Drive From the looks of it, I should be able to get rid of the partition.

My question to you guys is: Are there any issues I should look out for? Any potential glitches or anything? Has anybody ever tried this on a laptop that came with a partitioned hard drive right on the factory settings?

I know it may be silly to ask this as I don't see anything that could go wrong, especially when the DATA drive is empty, all 931 GB are free. But I did a factory reset on my other new laptop, followed the instructions I'd found, and somewhere along the way I got a surprise when during the reset process, I got a black screen and it asked me to clear... something, not sure what, and after a while I discovered the thing had glitched so it wasn't able to boot up. I managed to fix it by calling tech support, thankfully.

In light of that, and my recent run of luck with things lately, I wanted to check with you guys about any potential... surprises.

Insight?

[ChairmanPoo]

Most of the laptops I've had in the last 8 years came like that.

I kind of wouldn't meddle with it. I think there are good reasons to keep OS apart from the rest of the stuff.
I have meddled with partitions in linux. I kinda sorta recall  there are waya to try to merge partitions, depending on format and layout, without formatting both components, but I don't recall the details and I wouldnt guarantee it

[Lupin6]

Most of the laptops I've had in the last 8 years came like that.

I kind of wouldn't meddle with it. I think there are good reasons to keep OS apart from the rest of the stuff.
I have meddled with partitions in linux. I kinda sorta recall  there are waya to try to merge partitions, depending on format and layout, without formatting both components, but I don't recall the details and I wouldnt guarantee it

This is a Windows laptop, and I don't want it partitioned like this. I've also barely done a thing on it. I've set up the basics, installed a series of updates, installed Firefox, and signed into Skype. That's it.

[wierd]

your solutions are dependent on how the drive is partitioned.

If this unused and unwanted data partition comes directly AFTER the windows partition, then you can delete the data partition and use diskpart.exe to extend the windows partition so that it fills the whole disk.

If the data volume comes first, THEN the windows partition... Well, you are just boned unless you want to spend literally a whole damn day running something like partition magic to delete the data partition, MOVE the windows partition, THEN extend the windows partition.


The safest option of course, is to just ignore it and move on..  Mount the data volume with a drive letter, and install stuff there.

[Lupin6]

your solutions are dependent on how the drive is partitioned.

If this unused and unwanted data partition comes directly AFTER the windows partition, then you can delete the data partition and use diskpart.exe to extend the windows partition so that it fills the whole disk.

If the data volume comes first, THEN the windows partition... Well, you are just boned unless you want to spend literally a whole damn day running something like partition magic to delete the data partition, MOVE the windows partition, THEN extend the windows partition.


The safest option of course, is to just ignore it and move on..  Mount the data volume with a drive letter, and install stuff there.

I think the DATA partition is after the Windows drive. I mean, if by Windows you mean the C Drive. DATA is labeled with a D, so I assume DATA comes after. Or is it more complicated than that? For all I know, it is.

Also, what is diskpart.exe?

[wierd]

diskpart is the command-line driven alternative to using disk management.  I find it easier to use.

The ordering of the disk drives is not necessarily indicative of the order of the partitions on the drive.  Take a look in diskpart. Order from top to bottom of drive is displayed left to right on the visual representation.  If the data volume is directly to the right of the windows volume in disk management, you can delete the data volume and extend the windows partition.  You can use disk management to do that, like your linked guide shows, or you can use diskpart on the command line.

[Trekkin]

This is a Windows laptop, and I don't want it partitioned like this.

Why not?

I ask because, depending on what you don't like about it, there are things we can suggest with symlinks and so forth that are much safer than changing the partition table but don't need you to deal with the other partitions as directly.

[wierd]

Or mount it at an NTFS mount point instead of a drive letter.  Either way, safer than deleting it and extending the system partition.

[Lupin6]

Or mount it at an NTFS mount point instead of a drive letter.  Either way, safer than deleting it and extending the system partition.

I'm not really a very technical person, and I don't don't really want to bother with that sort of thing.

But thank you for the advice about diskpart. I looked up exactly how to use it, and after finding it, running diskpart as an administrator, I typed in the "list disk" command, and this is exactly what I got.

Disk ###	Status	Size	Free	Dyn	Gpt
Disk 0	Online	931 GB	0 B	(Blank space)	*
Disk 1	Online	119 GB	11 MB	(Blank space)	*

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks like the "DATA" Drive, D, is before the Windows Drive C, isn't it?

[ChairmanPoo]

No offense, but if you're not really technical, do you really want to start messing with partitions and potentially brick your PC?

[wierd]

"list disk" lists DISKS

Those are physically separate drives!!

You would select a disk with

"select disk *" (where * is a number) then
"list partition"  to list the partitions on that disk.


Since your data volume is a separate physical disk, we cannot do what you want to do.


What we *CAN* do is mount that disk as an NTFS mount point.  Say someplace like "C:\program files (x86)\Datadrive"

Then we can tell all the game installers (or whathaveyou) to install into a directory under there, and there will be no issues.

[Trekkin]

Then we can tell all the game installers (or whathaveyou) to install into a directory under there, and there will be no issues.

While that's possible, if there's two drives and the OS is on the smaller one, I'm strongly inclined to think he may have a little SSD and a big HDD, with the intention of using the SSD for programs and other frequently loaded files and the HDD as archive space. That's been in vogue for a while.

If that's the case, he'd probably want to just use the presumably faster C: as normal, since it sounds like this is to be a gaming machine, and maybe use the DATA drive as backup space.

[wierd]

We could also conceivably put the datadrive's mountpoint on /users/[his user]/documents instead.

That would make everything in the MyDocuments folder actually be on the data drive. We could redirect the browser caches there, and the like.

(We CANT point it at /users/[his user] because of how windows has decided to handle the appdata folder and pals inside. It will cause all kinds of trouble. The Documents folder is fair game though.)

[Lupin6]

Then we can tell all the game installers (or whathaveyou) to install into a directory under there, and there will be no issues.

While that's possible, if there's two drives and the OS is on the smaller one, I'm strongly inclined to think he may have a little SSD and a big HDD, with the intention of using the SSD for programs and other frequently loaded files and the HDD as archive space. That's been in vogue for a while.

If that's the case, he'd probably want to just use the presumably faster C: as normal, since it sounds like this is to be a gaming machine, and maybe use the DATA drive as backup space.

... Yeah.

It's embarrassing for me to admit, but you're right, and I made a mistake. As it turns out, the laptop I bought didn't just have a 1 TB hard drive (which is what I was looking for), but, to quote the Amazon page: "128 GB SSD + 1 TB 5400 RPM (SATA) HDD Dual drives...".

I missed that when I was reading the information. Though I suppose I wouldn't have recognized what it meant anyway, as I wasn't familiar with what SSD meant. Still, it's my mistake, and feel so very embarrassed. I've had a lot of things go wrong over the past few weeks (not just technical) and I guess the frustration has been getting to me. Really, I should have realized something didn't add up, quite literally, as, when I took another look at what I saw on the Windows Explorer, the size of the C Drive and the DATA Drive add up to MORE than 1 TB.

I'm very sorry about this, guys. I really am. In light of this, let me retract my question for a new one. I did some light reading, and I understand that these hybrid drives improve performance by basically letting you place all the OS files on the smaller, extra SSD drive, allowing you to install everything else on the larger, proper hard drive.

And that's how I want to use it. My plan is to install all applications on the larger DATA Drive and leave the SSD/C Drive to the OS files. The SSD is so comparatively small, I basically don't want to put anything on there that doesn't absolutely need to go there. I mean, 42 GB of 104 are already filled. Of course, I'll be uninstalling Firefox and reinstalling it on the DATA Drive.

My concern is this: What about programs that come with the laptop? For example, what about Skype? I simply signed into it, and it looks like it's installed on the C Drive. Is it possible to move it? If so, is it worth the effort? Or what about stuff like Microsoft Office? That's already on there, and I'd just need to enter the registration codes I got when I bought the software separately years ago. Would I get a choice there?

I can't think of any other examples off the top of my head at the moment, but you get the idea. I've never dealt with a hybrid drive like this before, and I'm worried about this much smaller SSD Drive getting filled up years down the road, so on and so on.

[Trekkin]

My concern is this: What about programs that come with the laptop? For example, what about Skype? I simply signed into it, and it looks like it's installed on the C Drive. Is it possible to move it? If so, is it worth the effort? Or what about stuff like Microsoft Office? That's already on there, and I'd just need to enter the registration codes I got when I bought the software separately years ago. Would I get a choice there?

I can't think of any other examples off the top of my head at the moment, but you get the idea. I've never dealt with a hybrid drive like this before, and I'm worried about this much smaller SSD Drive getting filled up years down the road, so on and so on.

First of all, don't sweat it; it's a really common mistake to make, and in fairness the laptop you bought did have the drive you thought it did. How often do you check to make sure the things you buy don't have extra features?

As to your plan, I feel like I should stress that the reason the SSD is faster is mostly because the drive itself loads faster, not because the OS is alone, so I'd put big things you want to load fast (like games) on C:, using the DATA drive for files, programs you're okay with loading slowly, or small programs for which you won't notice the difference -- but 60 GB is more space than it might seem, and most programs are much smaller than Windows.

That said, if you do just want to leave the OS alone on C:, you can certainly install all your programs to the DATA drive, but it also won't hurt to just put Office and Skype and Firefox on C:; you'd be making those programs load more slowly for no real benefit by moving them. I think Office in its entirety is about 3 GB, for example. If you don't want to use the SSD space anyway, why not let it stay there?