new laptop

[peat moss]

i have a quick question.the laptop came with vista homepremium and it has 120 gb hd.The problem is that it has acer c:/39.1 free of51.6gb then there is the d:/and it is titled data 51.2gb free of 51.3.am i allowed to save stuff on the d:/ o is that fo the recovery files?sorry im really not sure

John I bet my beer money you did n't get a Install cd ? It must be a Recovery Partition, don't delete it till you get a cd .


At startup you have the option of basically resetting to "store bought condition " by pressing a key , delete or f10 ?

[lynx]

Any recovery partition is normally invisible once you boot into windows (except possibly in disk manager). It would be a couple of GB at most.

Acer seem to split the drives into 2 equal partitions (a pretty stupid concept IMO, but better than a single huge partition). Both partitions are fully available for your use.

[clocker]

Any recovery partition is normally invisible once you boot into windows (except possibly in disk manager). It would be a couple of GB at most.

It would be visible in disk manager and it will be formatted FAT32 instead of NTFS.

[lynx]

Any recovery partition is normally invisible once you boot into windows (except possibly in disk manager). It would be a couple of GB at most.

It would be visible in disk manager and it will be formatted FAT32 instead of NTFS.

Not necessarily.

I've seen these partitions where the file system is marked as unknown, and others where the recovery partition is not even visible at all, having been masked somehow by boot sector information.

In the latter case the disk seems to be undersized. If you don't need the recovery partition the only way to get the full disk capacity is to write zeroes to the first 64 sectors of the disk.

I think it was Compaq who did it like that, particularly on their servers. I don't know if anyone else did it or if that method is still used though, which is why I said it may be visible in Disk Manager.

[peat moss]

Any recovery partition is normally invisible once you boot into windows (except possibly in disk manager). It would be a couple of GB at most.

Acer seem to split the drives into 2 equal partitions (a pretty stupid concept IMO, but better than a single huge partition). Both partitions are fully available for your use.

That does seem dumb and John would probably never use it like that , I was thinking about that as I knew I had made a mistake about the Recovery Partition as its not that large, its as you say a couple of gb depending what crap "they" installed for you .

[realityocheck]

you should check out bestbuys. they always have some open box laptops for cheep. i suggest you should spend another $100 and get a dual core.

[ng12345]

do you want a new laptop or would you go used?

could probably get a better deal used and wouldn't have to deal with a sempron