Disk Drive help please

bluenose1940

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Many of you know that I am not particularly brill at the techie stuff and so I am seeking a little help please.

I am trying to work out the situation with the hard drive that I am using.

I have attached a screenshot of Macrium reflect which I am now using but am confused at what I am looking at.
I have two internal drives. C: which holds my O/S is a 110GB Samsung SSD
There is also a Western Digital Hard Drive that I think is 1TB and is split into two partitions. One partition is the D: Drive which will hold all of my data and is 298GB. The second partition is the F: Drive which will hold the backup copy of my O/S and is 633GB.
I also have an external drive that has two partitions, this is a 1TB Seagate Plus. This is Drive H: and will hold the backup of all my data on the D: drive. The second Partition is the I: Drive which currently holds the backup copies of my data. I may well use this drive instead as an additional backup of my O/S.

The queries that I have are :- Why is my C: drive split into 4 sections and why has the H: and I: drives got a blank 145GB blank area between them.

If anyone has any thoughts on how best I might use my drives differently to how they are being used at the moment, I will be most appreciative of their input.

Many thanks.

Screenshot of Drives_1.jpg
 
As for your C: drive. Windows puts, what are in my opinion because I wouldn't do a Windows recovery, random partitions on to a C: drive as do the computer manufacturers for recovery purposes. There is, normally, an inaccessable Windows partion as well which is annoying, at least to me.



I think the blank area on your other drive has been caused by the fact that when it was split into partions the partition sizes have been incorrectly designated. To be honest I really do not understand why people partion drives. It's a faff at best and if the hard drive goes down so does the partition if it's on the same drive. Just make a folder and call it storage or something similar. Much easier and less faff. If you have nothing on your second drive I would delete the partitions and format the drive as one then, as I say just use folders for your storage labelled appropriately.
 
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Hello Pete, thanks for coming in on this. At some point very soon, I am going to do a clean install of the Windows O/S and so I suppose that doing that may possibly tidy up that particular drive a little.

With regard to the external drives, is it possible for me to re-partition them, i.e. to make them into a single drive without any partitions?
 
Yes you can re-partition external drives either using Windows Disk manager or with Macrium. Macrium is marginally more user intuitive, in my opinion, than Windows Disk Manager but either will do it. You wont get rid of all the random partitions on your C: drive because Windows puts a recovery partition on. When I do a clean install of Windows I just save all my personal files from the C:/Users/your name folder and then delete all the partitons on my C: drive and then install to an "unallocated" partition and let windows do it's thing. BUT before you do any of this ensure that you have backed everything up that you want to keep to somewhere that isn't going to be affected by a re-install or a re-partition
 
Whoa, hold on a minute! Don't do anything to the C: drive because it's an SSD. The whole disk is still C: drive and nothing else. That's the SSD doing its file management.
 
Whoa, hold on a minute! Don't do anything to the C: drive because it's an SSD. The whole disk is still C: drive and nothing else. That's the SSD doing its file management.


I have three partions on my C: drive. The active partiton which holds Windows. A recovery partiton that Windows puts on when it gets installed and a system reserved partition which is a different letter and is installed by Windows and does not show in "my computer." Nothing to denote, partiton wise, that my disk is an SSD which it is.



The OP is going to re-install his drives. He can, and I do, delete all the partitions at the beginning of the install process and let Windows sort it out.
 
There's only one drive name and that's C:.

here's mine, a 500 gig SSD. The unallocated area is actually an area I reserved for performance.

 
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