Hi, Can someone explain partitions to me

I'm no expert, but I'll give it a shot. When you partition a drive, essentially you're just creating "separate" drives. From what you say, it appears you have a 120Gb HD partitioned into 3 drives. I don't know if there are any cons, but I believe the pros would be a faster seek time??? Not sure, but that's what it would appear to me. Instead of having to search a 120Gb HD, you can just search the 40Gb C, D, or E drive. Another pro is it makes it a little easier for you to search for stuff. For example, you can dedicate one partition/drive for mp3 files, which I myself have done, and another for your system and program files.
I for one have never changed any partitions, but there is software out there that will do it.
Hope that helps some.

Are we talking about the F4000? Mine actually has 3 partitions:

ACER (C
ACERDATA (D
PQSERVICE (no drive letter)

The big advantage is that if one partition crashes then you still have the data on the other one. This is especially true when you're running FAT32 on the C drive, which is very sensitive to system crashes - I once lost 80 GB of files on a FAT32 drive that got converted to FILEXXXX.CHK files by CHKDSK due to failed overclocking attemt (not on an acer system).

The Acer eRecovery tool (press Alt+F10) allows you to backup your entire C drive to compressed image files on your D drive. In order for this to work the eRecovery utilizes the PQSERVICE partition, which contains a minimal WIN98 and PowerQuest Drive Image (or is it Norton Ghost?) which allows you to make an exact copy of your system. This means that if you have a system crash - e.g. during conversion of the C drive to NTFS then you can just use eRecovery to restore your backup from the D drive. I wonder why the PQSERVICE partition is only 54% full and therefore takes up more than required - 2.93 GB is a lot for a backup system.

A backup image stored on D can be burned onto CDs or DVDs - but you cannot make direct image backups to CDs/DVDs.

I would recommend that you move all your essential data to the D drive (e.g. MP3 and backups), but you could also change the location of your documents (look under the properties of your "My Documents" folder) to the D drive. This way you don't put all your "eggs in one basket".

So if I understand correctly, you can easily backup the C but not the D-drive, so essential data should be on the C (which has a backup), not the D (which has no backup), care to explain why you would do it the otherway around?

If the system drive (C) is in FAT32, then any system crash is likely to corrupt the C drive. Actually I have now changed my C: drive to NTFS, which makes me want to move my documents back on the C drive, since myd D drive is still FAT32.

In any case you should be using alternative backup systems - it's quite easy to burn an image down on a couple of DVDs.

Well, to be honest, I don't really backup, I kept some copies on different servers of my masters thesis while I was writing it. But for the rest, there's nothing on my PC that whould be dramatic if I would lose it. Most games I have on CD, most programs I use can easily be downloaded again, since they are almost all available for free. The only thing I would miss (a bit) would be my music files, but if I have to start keeping a copy of that, I would be using about 10 disc's, so until I have a DVD-writer, backup is actually totally out of the question.
Anyway, been working with computers for about 15 years now, never had a faulty harddrive. I don't know if that means I'm lucky, or most people just screw around too much with their PC.

i think its the latter; but should some conversion ideally be done when you buy your computer

I was able to say the same thing, until last Summer. In 17 years of working with computers I never had a major breakdown or a hard drive failure. But then my main drive went bad on my desktop. Mechanical failure of the drive--nothing to do with software or setup.

Fortunately I had almost all of my DATA (Teaching materials, research, etc. )backed up on a DVD. But it took me about two weeks (using all of my spare time) to install all of my programs again and set things up the way they were before.

I immediately went out and bought back-up software that would make a complete image of the drive. If it happens again I can restore everything in the time that it takes to have the program copy the image from the DVD.

I guess the problem is that I don't want to spend several hours installing all the software again (getting software activation codes ect. takes ages). I'm currently finishing writing my PhD Thesis, and as I'm paranoid I have 3 different backup scripts like this:

if not Exist "\\**network location**" exit
xcopy "d:\My Documents\*.*" "\\**network location**\My Documents\*.*" /V /D /Y /S /K /H

This way I can make relative quick incremental backups which store a backup of my thesis (Including ~3GB of raw data) on 3 different PC's at 3 different locations - I will be relatively safe even in case of a major fire

For a comparison of NTFS and FAT32 look at www.ntfs.com - I would choose NTFS over FAT32 any day. The only reason why Acer did not sell the laptop with NTFS formatted hard drive is that some older software is not compatible with NTFS. And since you can easily convert FAT32->NTFS but not vice versa I think Acer did the right thing.

Real men don't use backups - real men cry a lot!

Why don't people just have one partition?

Yep, I have a hard drive with two partitions.
I have to say it doesn't bother me at all.
I use Partition C for boring programs and the Operating system.

And Partition D is for my games , porn and Mp3's

But even if you have a partition with the OS in it, you'd still have to re-install the OS every once in a while anyway, right? So why not just have one partition?

Ok. Follow these instructions.
Right click on My Computer -> properties -> manage
The computer Managment window will open up.
Click on Disk Managment on the left hand side.
If your window looks like the picture below, your system is good.

People usually keep 2 partitions as the minimum.
One partition for the operating system and installed programs. The second partition is for storage of files, like documents, mp3s pictures or movies.

They do this because if anything happens to the operating system partition and it gets corrupted, the usual thing to do is format the drive and do a fresh instal of the operating system.

Having your files on the second partition prevents them from being lost should a corruption on the operating system partition happen.

Ooooh. I never thought of that. Mike just says to get an exsternal Hard Drive for that, and he never uses partitions.

who's Mike?

Not using FAT32 would be a good way to prevent corruption... since NTFS is a whole lot less prone to it. Also... placing the page file on a different partition can slightly increase access times. The suggestion for an external hard drive is a good one for storing movies,music,etc though in case of HDD failure.

External HDs are a great idea. I bought a brand new Seagate HD (normally more expensive than other brands) with 160GB for $100 on sale at Circuit City. So if any of you are planning to go out and buy an external HD, see if you can find a sale for such an expensive buy. (normally they seem to go for about $1 a GB)

-Ransom