Inspiron 6400 hd help plz

[Bigballer044]

i got a 6400 and it arrived today and i had ordered a 100 GB 5400 RPM SATA Hard drive and when i go to my computer there is a Local Disc (C:) whisch is 65.1GB and a Backup (D:) which is 21.3 GB is that a problem or how it is if it is a problem plz reply quick so i can notify manufacturer.

[Yoob@NBF]

It seems pretty normal. If you want to recover that harddrive space you should reinstall windows completely. Within the install you have the option of wiping all the partitions and making them into one big super drive.

[Bigballer044]

first off its brand new and the drive is 65.1GB total


what does the bsckup d drive do then?

[Prosaic]

first off its brand new and the drive is 65.1GB total
No it's not. Add up everything on the drive.

You have a 65.1 GiB C: partition and a 21.3 GiB D: partition. That totals 86.4 GiB so far. Now add in a 5 GiB Dell PC Restore partition and a 1.5 GiB MediaDirect HPA and you have a total of 92.9 GiB. Since a GibiByte (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibibyte) equals 1,073,741,824 bytes, that equals about 99,750,615,450 bytes of total disk space. Just what you'd expect from a 100 GB drive.

[Bigballer044]

ok now i get it but if i fill up the c drive does it start to uuse the d drive or how does that work?

[MarkMcK]

... how does that work?

It's hard drive 'space' just like any other. You can read/write files/data to the 'D' partition just like you would to your 'C' partition. That said, things don't 'overflow' from 'C" to 'D' automatically. You need to intentionally move things around.

Partitions are kind of like big 'folders'. The key difference is that if you ever need to reinstall Windows onto your 'C' partition, files/data on 'C' will be erased, whereas files on 'D' will not.

hth

Mark

[poison7fl]

This pi$$ed me off too.. So I just reformatted, deleted the partitions and re-installed. Easy, and recovered all of the wasted space.

[Yoob@NBF]

I personally would keep the back up partition as you no longer need the recover discs in the event of a disaster.