D drive

Groucho10

Computer novice here ! I have a Sony Vaio VGN fe28h with 160GB of HD. It has a C and D drive with 80 gigs on each.

I believe the D drive is called a partition drive and can used to put a copy of the C drive onto should you wish.

Are these two physically separate drives or one split into two?

If you don't wish to copy your C drive onto your D can you use your D for just normal stuff ?

Many Thanks

alanjgrace

Yes sounds like you have a partition on your drive splitting it into 2 equal amounts, its still one hard drive.You can use the D part for whatever you want. I would reccomend keeping any programs you install on C along with your windows files and then anything you install yourself games, music, video etc on the D part

Groucho10

Thanks Alan. That's made things clearer.

I also purchased a Seagate 200 GB external drive. I thought possibly to copy my C drive to this using an imaging system.

Would you reccommend this, or is copying the whole drive a bit over the top?

Should I just use it as extra storage off the main computer for backing up photos,I-Tunes etc.

ethernet

Groucho10 wrote:

Thanks Alan. That's made things clearer.

I also purchased a Seagate 200 GB external drive. I thought possibly to copy my C drive to this using an imaging system.

Would you reccommend this, or is copying the whole drive a bit over the top?

Should I just use it as extra storage off the main computer for backing up photos,I-Tunes etc.

Maybe create an image of your system and store it on the external drive. Additionally, have your documents, music and photos synced with your hard drive too. Microsoft have a handy little tool for doing just that, called SyncToy. Your drive probably came with software to do the same thing however.

Groucho10

Thanks. I will check that out.

steveland?

You can keep all the stuff you'd like to keep "safe" on your D drive. The logic being if your Windows installation packs up and gets infected with viruses etc you can just reinstall Windows on the C drive partition and all the stuff (documents, music, video, photos etc) on your D drive is safe without having to back up all the time (although that's still highly recommended if you wish to keep these files safe)

What I do is install all my programs onto the main C drive but keep the installation files (the exe's) on the seperate partition so if Windows ever has to be wiped and uninstalled I won't have to re-download Firefox/Winamp/VLC/Foxit etc. again as I have the install files kept safe on the seperate partition.

I'd recommend keeping all the music etc that you want to listen to/use all the time on the D drive and also back everything up onto the external HDD as I presume you won't want to be carrying the external everywhere with your laptop.

It also means that if your hard drive in your laptop packs up you have everything backed up on the external aswell as the D drive. Copying to the D drive will prevent against losing things if there's a software failure and a reinstall is required but won't protect against hardware failure (your hard drive failing).

Of course there's also the chance of your external drive failing but it's a lot less likely that they'd both fail at once.

Groucho10

Thanks Steve. I will do that with the D drive.

One thing I can't get my head around regarding the external - If I copy an image of the C drive onto this and I do this every week or so to keep it up to date, - I then don't need to individually copy photos,music etc. onto the external, right ?

I should be able to find them in the C drive copy. Or am I wrong here ?

Told you I was a novice.