( Acer Aspire 7720G ) 2 x Hard Drive problems.

In the specs listed on the website, and on the sticker on the laptop itself:

320 GB Dual HDD
(160 GBx2)

I am going insane, on the device manager it says I have two HDs, but I think one of them has been partitioned, the one with the windows data on (C drive) the HDs in my computer are displayed as this:



I've been told of a program call 'Raid' or something, but I'm really not sure what it actually does.

I just want to know if the two smaller HDs are partitioned and if possible, how to join them up again, I am going crazy!

Thanks for any help!

 

Open up your Start menu, and type in diskmgmt.msc. Accept the UAC prompt, and take a look at your screen.
The lower portion of the window should clearly show you which partition is on which disk.

As for RAID, it stands for Redundant Array of Independent Drives.
There are a number of RAID modes, such as striping one partition over two drives for increased performance (RAID 0), or having one copy of the same partition on each drive (RAID 1).

 

I have been trying to find this window for ages, I could not for the life of me remember. This is the result:



I now know for definate that the HD is partitioned, but I, however, am not sure what the 'EISA Confirguration' partition is.

Now, how do I join the two partitions together? Or just get rid of one?

Thank you.

 

The EISA partition is your hidden recovery partition.

D: Is a separate HDD

The other HDD consists of these:
EISA
C:
E:

To Join C: and E: together your going to have to use a third party disk management tool as the windows disk management tool won't let your increase your system partition.

There are several you can use, Acronis Disk Director and Paragon Partition Manager are windows based programs that will let you do this, they do cost but have free trials that will let you merge partitions (I think).

Gparted is another very good disk utility program, this works outside windows. This needs to be burnt to disk, or USB, and is bootable.

 

I think you could just backup the e: drive partition to an external drive, delete it, then expand the C: drive partition to fill out the rest of the HDD. Probably have to make the C: drive the primary partition as well.

 

C: is probably already a primary partition - it's just that the window doesn't have enough room to show that.
EDIT: And the blue strip across the top of the partition denotes it's primary anyway.

You can use Windows Disk Management to extend C: if you delete E: (after backing it up, of course).
Bangert, I don't know where you got the idea that WDM can't extend the system partition. I never had any such problem with extending - shrinking is a different kettle of fish, of course.

 

On single hard drive laptops , If you mess up the partitions structure , erecovery will fail to operate .

Just a warning ..


I have no idea how erecovery will react , in the laptops with two hard drives !!

 

I come across this all the time, I can shrink the system partition, but not extend. I've never been able to extend the system partition using WDM, always end up using gparted.