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.

"Matty" wrote in message
...
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.

Go into Disk Management by typing DISKMGMT.MSC in the Run (or the
Search) dialog box off the Start Menu. Right click the D: partition and
select Delete Volume. Then you can right click the C: partition and
select Extend Volume, in order to expand the C: partition to include the
unallocated space made by deleting the D: partition.


--
LeeTutor

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" wrote in message
...
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.

Matty, I think your owners manual tells you how to use the backup to save
your operating system in case of failure.

"Matty" wrote in message
...
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" wrote in message
...
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.

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" wrote in message
...
Matty, I think your owners manual tells you how to use the backup to save
your operating system in case of failure.

"Matty" wrote in message
...
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?
Snip

On Tue, 5 Aug 2008 17:24:43 -0400, "Matty" wrote:

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.

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)?

Leave the *partition *D: over there as it is; You can use it as a
recover partion in case there is a operating system crash. If you still
don't want it then use software by the name of partition magic.


--
tanuj_chadha

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.

Paul Montgomery" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 5 Aug 2008 17:24:43 -0400, "Matty" wrote:

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.

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)?

"Matty" wrote in message
...
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.


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...