the techie found a 40gb HDD in my vista home premium and disabled it

The heading says it all, why did he disable my 40GB HDD? What will happen to my computer?

Vista Home Premium. Intel Core2 CPU 6300 @1.86GHz
RAM 4.00 GB 32-bit OS

We need to know lots more about it, and your system, first!

Please open Disk Management (diskmgmt.msc) and take a screenshot - attach it to your reply, and we'll see what we can see.
Please also fill in more deatils about your system Specs, and run MSINFO32 - Save the data to your desktop, compress it, and attach that as well.

Hi Noel, is this what you need?

I'd have preferred the text version of the MSINFO32 (File>Save in the menu bar) - but that'll do.

There is no indication in Disk Management of any other drive present - and no empty partition or drive free space.
You appear to have two physical HDD drives - a 320GB drive to which the system boots, and a 1TB data drive.

What was this 40GB 'HDD' previously used for? - and why?

I didn't even know the 40GB HDD was there, until the techie found it and disabled it. I intend to get a new computer as I do a lot of graphics. In the process of finding out whether this pc would be ok for an upgrade (Windows7 64bit) the 40GB was found. Unfortunately this pc is old, so not a good proposition for an upgrade. Thanks for all the info Noel.