I have an Acer Aspire 1670 laptop that has a 40GB hard drive. When checking under properties for the drive it shows as two 20GB drives. At the moment I have one drive that is almost full and the other is empty, it is affecting the speed of my computer. How do I get to use the 2nd drive to run progs etc. Any advice please!!
2006-10-06 08:46:43 · 8 answers · asked by Anonymous in Computers & Internet ➔ Hardware ➔ Laptops & Notebooks
there are 2 options open to you ,the first is the simpler one ,just install the second drive as a slave drive,you must set the jumpers on the drive by looking on the makers website and going to support were you will find jumper config,s for that drive,then using a dual ide cable(which you should have allready) and connect the middle plastic connector to your slave drive,and also a 5v power plug(there should be some of these spare hanging in your case,then power up and the p.c will recognize the drive and boot into windows were it will load all the drivers for the hard drive aswell
the 2nd option is only possible if you have serial ata sockets on your motherboard(these are tiny 4 plug sockets and are normally red in colour) you will find them near the corner of the motherboard
if you have these then you could have a go at installing raid(redunntant array of independent disks),this is a method of using 2 or more discs together to speed up data access,allthough it is quite difficult for novices and there are downsides to doing this
the most popular raid configuration is raid 0 were you use 2 discs and both will have xp installed on them,and in theory this is suppose to increase the spped that programs load and that you can access the info on the hard drives,and if one of your hard drives fail you can still use the operating system on the remaining drive
to do this you will want to read this article http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=100110,this will give you a rundown on all the different types of raid and also instructions on how to install windows xp on a raid drive
i would recommend you do the first option if you want a quick fire solution to storage ,but if you do raid on your system it will be better for your p.c giving it a slight speed boost
good luck
2006-10-06 10:18:34 · answer #1 · answered by brianthesnail123 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Get hold of a program like Partition Magic or Partition Commander. These will enable you to merge the partitions into one.
Your drive has been divided or partitioned into 2 seperate areas (actually a good thing). I tend to keep my operating system on one partition and files on the other, as do major servers.
2006-10-06 08:50:48 · answer #2 · answered by Steven 4 · 0⤊ 0⤋
It seems that your drive is partitioned into two different partitions. You will need to delete the partition to obtain only 1 partition. You can use FDisk from microsoft to delete the partition however this will DELETE ALL data from your machine. You may want to use third party software such as Partition Magic which will remove the partion without deleting your data.
Has that answered your question?
2006-10-07 02:48:55 · answer #3 · answered by Siu02rk 3 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Mine was the same, you need partition magic to alter the partition size, mines set at 35gig for c and 5gig for d.
it does not have 2 drives, the other thing you could do is to start installing new programs to the d drive.
you should also defrag your hardrive regularly as well as doing a disk clean up in system tools.
2006-10-06 08:53:13 · answer #4 · answered by john b 3 · 0⤊ 0⤋
this is one drive that has been partitioned as to look like its 2 drives, there is no difference than using one drive, just when you store docs and such put them in the other drive, you can merge the two with a program like partition magic but not recommended unless you know what you are doing
2006-10-06 08:50:33 · answer #5 · answered by baconbuttyman 2 · 0⤊ 0⤋
I agree with my coleague, you'll need partition magic, this will put the two together, they ARE NOT seperate drives, but one which has two partions, why I don't know but some manufacturers do this, ignore the message about 'jumpers' its a load of b*****, one drive two partitions, you could back up the files and use your cd to make one ?????
2006-10-06 21:23:17 · answer #6 · answered by david g 3 · 0⤊ 0⤋
If you know there are 2 physical, intact, not a partitioning slip-up hard drives in there, find out in your BIOS if you can set up RAID. However, you probably need to reformat your hard drives afterward :(
2006-10-06 14:16:01 · answer #7 · answered by dashwarts 5 · 0⤊ 2⤋
http://www.perfectdrivers.com/howto/seconddrive.html
2006-10-06 08:51:03 · answer #8 · answered by RamsGod 3 · 0⤊ 1⤋