How come my new PC shows 2 hard drves?!

[Flompy]

I ordered a Dell Vista machine and it is lush, very gorgeous. I asked for it to have a 120gb hard drive, however when I look under 'computer' there are 2 hard drives?! One named OS which is showing as 101gb and one as BACKUP which shows at 9.99gb in size (dunno where the extra 9 odd gigs to make up 120 has gone).

Thing is, does this extra backup hard drive do anything at all? There are 2 gigs used yet when I click on it there are no files at all to show, so don't know where they are? Also, could this just be a partition & if so, could I just make the 2 hard drives merge into one?

Cheers in advance for your replies

[sj33]

It's a separate partition where they put restore information. This is common on prebuilt machines from such companies.

You can use something like PartitionMagic to format that partition and merge it back into your main.

[EvilBoris]

PC suppliers like DELL usually partition the drive off into 2, the backup drive will have a hidden archived version of what your PC looked like after the fressh DELL vista install.

If your PC goes wrong at a later date and you want to reformat it you will pick restore or something similar in the bios as the PC boots up, this will then wipe it clean and install the files on that second partition.

[Flompy]

Oh! Thanks for that info guys, well I have a proper boot disk and after 5 years with my old XP machine never needed anything like seperate partitions.. do you all think it would be ok for me to merge the partitions, or would it be slly?

[EvilBoris]

I'd probably leave it alone to be honest, you don't know what DELLs bios might do if the partition was gone.

[Flompy]

LOL yes you were correct as I reformatted it and then Vista wouldn't work and I had to do a reinstall, one day after I got the new Laptop

It runs even faster now it doesn't have all of the Dell programs on it now however, so it's all good!

[Number45]

Yeah, just to confirm that Dell PCs are fine if you remove all of that crap. First thing I do is a fresh install to get rid of all the proprietary crap, as well as create two partitions (One for system and one for data, simplifying any rebuilds massively).