C drive/D drive

riclad

no its not.
Its a good idea.
Someone set up the drive that way for a reason.
It means you won,t lose all your data on d,
IF for reason you have to reinstall the os,
some people reinstall windows 7 every 2 years .

PropJoe10

Jaysus, there's more wrong information in this thread than you could shake a stick at. IT experts galore.

ItHurtsWhenIP

Some manufacturers partition their drives in two, Acer and Samsung come to mind. The C drive is sometimes small while the D drive is large (and the recovery partition is hidden btw). I've used partitioned disks for about 15 or 16 years, C for the OS only and D for my data store. It means I can nuke the OS without losing anything. Grand if you know what you're doing but not so much if you don't know and end up with a full C and empty D.

ItHurtsWhenIP wrote: »

What happens when Ransomware scrambles the data in the cloud? :eek:

I know somebody whose business was shut down for 4 weeks while their cloud storage provider struggled to restore their data.

I once had a customer whose data in Dropbox was encrypted by ransomware. A support call to Dropbox allowed them to restore the entire Dropbox store to a previous date so no data was lost. Excellent service.

Fionn

The Witches Cat wrote: »

So is that unusual that I have 292gb free on D drive??

It's not unusual and as many have stated it's more than likely for data storage with the C: drive for the Operating System, most recovery partitions are hidden from the OS anyway.

It might help somewhat if you gave a little bit more information like what Operating System? How many Hard Drives are installed, if you can use Disk Management to see the partitions etc.

ItHurtsWhenIP

Karsini wrote: »

I once had a customer whose data in Dropbox was encrypted by ransomware. A support call to Dropbox allowed them to restore the entire Dropbox store to a previous date so no data was lost. Excellent service.

It was a a different service they used ... not a well known one ... I'd never heard of it before ... using the previous version of files is something that should help and is available in Dropbox and Google Drive, but as Ransomware evolves, if it can wipe Volume Shadow Copies it might target cloud versions of same.

tuxy

Feel free to move over photos, videos, music or whatever to the D drive. Just don't move programs as they need to be installed. It's fine to install new programs on the d drive. Just use it how you would any other storage drive.

Can't believe this took 3 pages.

L1011

Edups wrote: »

Sorry I'll shred my IT cert because they must have changed the use of drives and not told me. How stupid of me.

Please do.

was traditionally the optical drive, if you really want to get in to poor quality IT education; anyway

Ash.J.Williams

Edups wrote: »

No.
It is your recovery drive and do not attemp to put files in it.

If you're running low on space buy a new hardrive or store some non essential files in the cloud or on a USB stick.

Best of luck in your career

PropJoe10

Edups wrote: »

No.
It is your recovery drive and do not attemp to put files in it.

If you're running low on space buy a new hardrive or store some non essential files in the cloud or on a USB stick.

At least try to read the OP before posting. I have yet to see a recovery partition on anything thats 300GB in size.

L1011

Or indeed writeable from Windows by default since hard drives came in sizes that big. For obvious corruption/accident/malice reasons.

riclad

I D,ont have windows 10,. a recovery partition should be 20-50gig max,
All the ones i have seen are 10-15gig for windows 7 laptops .
Just use the 300gig drive for storage of music, photos, video files .
recovery partitions are hidden ,they should not be visible in my computer .
My computer shows drive c,d, and the dvd drive if the pc has one.

The Witches Cat

Thanks everybody for taking the time to reply to my question. Because of all the conflicting info I'm still none the wiser but I appreciate your help.
Thanks!

salamanca22

The Witches Cat wrote: »

Thanks everybody for taking the time to reply to my question. Because of all the conflicting info I'm still none the wiser but I appreciate your help.
Thanks!

The short of it is, you can use that drive for downloads, installations or whatever else you like, it's not a recovery partition like previously mentioned.

If you would like to start using it then during the installation of software you will need to change the install location to this D drive, just change C to D in the install path when it asks where you would like to install the software, note that some software assumes you want to install on the C drive and doesn't give you the option unless you click advanced install.

If you would like your downloads to go here then you will need to set up your browser to do so. I will link to instructions to do this on popular browsers. Just make sure you make a downloads folder under the D drive and don't just set the download location to \ as that will create a big mess on the drive.

Firefox https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/959747
Chrome https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95759?co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop&hl=en
Edge http://www.ghacks.net/2016/06/25/how-to-change-the-ie-and-edge-download-folder/
Internet Explorer https://support.microsoft.com/en-ca/help/17436

The Muppet

The Witches Cat wrote: »

Thanks everybody for taking the time to reply to my question. Because of all the conflicting info I'm still none the wiser but I appreciate your help.
Thanks!

It's safe to move your stuff from you c drive to your d drive .

Chances are that your c and d drive are physically the same drive divided into different Partitions .(sections). It is not a recovery drive though it could have some backup files . If there are files on d leave them alone just to be on the safe side.

Reati

Edups wrote: »

Storing files on the recovery partition can cause the process to fail if your software crashes and needs recovery. OP unless you're happy to bin your computer if it stops working right don't touch the / drive

Sounds like the same sales pitch used in some of the big electric chains here to scare non techies into buying crapware they don't need. :rolleyes:

Edups, what do you charge to "fix" a computer in this state?

allybhoy

Jesus some amount of tripe posted in thr last few pages. Its perfectly fine to store data on tbe D drive.

Usually most PCS will only have one main partition but there could be a few reasons why you have two, answer a few questions and ill try to help, is this a pc or desktop? Reason I ask is I suspect that your C or OS drive is possibly an SSD (solid state drive). SSD's are quicker and more expensive than conventional HDDs and because of this they are usually smaller in size. Most gamers will insfall an SSD for their OS (windows / linux) to give maximum performance and then have another conventional disk for storage. (D/E whatever)

Here is some simple advise...open computer management then disk management and then examine they layout of your disks. You will see the amount of disk drives here,

If you have two, they will show as seperate disks and then you will understand why you have two disks. If you right click the disk on the left pane and select propetries you will be abe to find the type of disk, should say SSD somewhere in one of the tabs


if yoy only have one you will see its partitioned with your c and d. If your disk is partitioned (live on same disk) and you have an OS such as Windows 7 or later then you will be able to shrink your D drive and expand your C drive, if you wanted to of course, otherwise you could just save stuff to the D drive. As others have said it's always good practise to have some form of backup, and an ideal scenario is to have local (external usb) and cloud backup (dropbox / live drive / one drive etc etc)

ItHurtsWhenIP

The Witches Cat wrote: »

Thanks everybody for taking the time to reply to my question. Because of all the conflicting info I'm still none the wiser but I appreciate your help.
Thanks!

The Muppet wrote: »

It's safe to move your stuff from you c drive to your d drive .

Chances are that your c and d drive are physically the same drive divided into different Partitions .(sections). It is not a recovery drive though it could have some backup files . If there are files on d leave them alone just to be on the safe side.

@The Witches Cat ... what @The Muppet says is most likely the case and follow what @salamanca22 suggested. You'll be grand! Trust us, we know what we're doing. I've been doing it for over 25 years. I don't know about the other two, but what they say is good advice.

Orion

ItHurtsWhenIP wrote: »

@The Witches Cat ... what @The Muppet says is most likely the case and follow what @salamanca22 suggested. You'll be grand! Trust us, we know what we're doing. I've been doing it for over 25 years. I don't know about the other two, but what they say is good advice.

In other words ignore everything Edups said and you'll be fine.

The Muppet

ItHurtsWhenIP wrote: »

@The Witches Cat ... what @The Muppet says is most likely the case and follow what @salamanca22 suggested. You'll be grand! Trust us, we know what we're doing. I've been doing it for over 25 years. I don't know about the other two, but what they say is good advice.

Same here at it since the days of DOS . I don't have a cert though , not missing much by the looks of things .I'd have binned many a pc if I followed the advice offered here .

chrismon

Edups wrote: »

No.
It is your recovery drive and do not attemp to put files in it.

If you're running low on space buy a new hardrive or store some non essential files in the cloud or on a USB stick.

Statements like this are the reason so many people are terrified of computers.

Orion

The Muppet wrote: »

Same here at it since the days of DOS . I don't have a cert though , not missing much by the looks of things .I'd have binned many a pc if I followed the advice offered here .

MSDOS or DRDOS?

riclad

You can put any data on drive d, use c for programs ,eg install vlc player,
install roxio cd burner.
Programs are installed on c by default .
The restore os data is in a a hidden partition visible from control panel ,admin,storage, drives, it,ll be labeled drive E or F ,Recovery .

branners69

OP consider your hard drive to be a large cake. You can cut into as many pieces as you like, in your case the cake is cut into two pieces: your c: and your d:

What you use the c: for is programs like Word, Chrome (internet) etc and the Operating System which will be Windows 8 or Windows 10.

You can use d: as storage. Double click into it and when it is open, click the right button of your mouse when the pointer is in the middle of the screen. You should get a menu, select new and then folder. You can name this folder what you want Photos, Music etc. You can then copy and store whatever you want on d: You can create as many folders you like.

Dont be worrying about the other stuff people have mentioned, but getting back to the cake, whoever made your laptop will have taken a slice of cake you cant see. They use this in case you may need to restore your pc in the future!!

I want some cake now :D:D

Dermot Illogical

OP, if you block Edups and reload the thread you'll find that the quality of information is improved.
Create folders on your drive for photos/videos/music/downloads etc and knock yourself out filling them.
The world won't end, and if you ever need to reinstall the OS your files on will survive the process as long as you don't format that drive or screw around with partitioning.