Partitioned Hard Drive - Help Please

Well I finally got my ASUS W5.

When I looked at 'my computer' i was like..WAT THE HELL? 2 drives? ok..so this shocked me completely..

anyways talked to a few people and they said it works faster or something.

but now i hav a few questions:

1. basically, its meant to have 80GB. except C: has 44GB and D: has 29GB which means its only 73GB altogether. where's the rest?
2. the WINDOWS was already installed in C: when i got the laptop, and then MY DOCUMENTS was also in C: (and i have all my videos, music, media...) in there too. so rite now, D: (29GB) has nothing in there. What should i put in there? i was thinking about putting in my music/videos but i don't want them to be for the public. I like them in MY DOCUMENTS because its from my own account so its protected. what should i do?

:asus:

 

1) Basically, you'll rarely ever get the advertised amount of hard drive space - they ALWAYS round up to the nearest tenth. For example, my 40 gig hard drive has 37.2 Gb... my brother's 60gig hard drive is only 54 or something like that. It's not something to worry about... that's just how hard drives are.

2) I believe ASUS partitions the hard drive because there is recovery data on the D: that you cannot see (i'm not 100% sure, but I think so). Also, it's totally up to you what you put on there... if I were you though, I'd use D: as a means of BACKUP rather than an alternate "main" drive, you know? Like, I'd only put important data there that you don't want to lose...

Hope this helps,
Sam

EDIT: Congrats on your purchase of an ASUS notebook :asus:

 

well now i think i've made a new decision:

i don't think i need to backup anything because i have a 120GB back up external drive.

but i was going to put movies in one drive and documents in the others.

except the drives aren't the right size. so i'm wondering how I can make D: merge into C:

do i use the system restore disk? i read there's somethign in win xp pro i can use? or do i use a program? help pls.

 

actually, is it possible to separate DOCUMENTS AND SETTINGS and WINDOWS into 2 differernt drives?

 

windows reports the size of the hard drive using base 2, not base 10. So 1gb = 2^30 = 1,073,741,824 bytes . THe hard drive companies report their size using base 10. So if they say 80gb = 80,000,000,000 bytes... so divide that with 2^30 and you get 74.5GB (base 2). Some companies like Western Digital will give you like 79,500,000,000 bytes and call it an 80gb drive (i don't like WD) and other companies like Maxtor (my fav desktop hard drive) will give you something like 83,500,000,000 and call it 80gb. So if you buy a maxtor, depending on the size of the drive, you will always get 1 - 7gb of extra hard drive space!