Reassigning hard drive functions

[radinhouston]

I have a Dell Inspiron 1720 with two internal hard disks, 160gb each. Disk 0 holds the C drive with Vista and all my apps, photos, vids etc. The same disk also has the E drive for system restore and a couple of very small drives whose functions I know not. Disk 1 has only one drive, D, which is solely for backup. It's filled up and no longer accepts data, so I recently bought a 1tb Seagate FreeAgent external drive, designated H, to take over backup functions. It works fine. I now have my C drive copied onto H and can safely delete the D drive contents. I want to use D to share duties with C, which is about 3/4 full.
Questions:
- How should I empty D? Drag all its contents to the recycle bin? Format it? Both?
- After D is emptied, how do I tell Vista to send new content there? Does Vista do that automatically? Should I wait until C is filled up before sending stuff to D, or should I manually transfer some there right away, so each drive will be about equally full? How can I make the two disks function as a single C drive?

I know this is elementary stuff but would appreciate your advice!

 

[Jonathan_King]

Welcome!

A fast way to clear the D drive is to do a format. There is no need for a full format, a quick one will work just fine.

Now, short of converting both disks into Dynamic (which I do not recommend), there is no way to make the drives function as one.

When the need arises, you can tell your programs to install on the other drive, but it will not happen automatically.

Hope this answers you question!

~JK

 

[whs]

1. I question the wisdom of deleting D. This is your recovery partition that you might need one day. I assume you have at least burnt the recovery disks from D because else you would never be able to reinstll your system.
2. Merging C and D is dead simple. You do that in disk management by deleting the volume and partition on D and then you add the gained unallocated space to C. I have made a little video tutorial that explains the whole procedure (although in a slightly different context):

http://www.vimeo.com/8722519

 

[kenny111111]

Disk 0 holds the C drive with Vista and all my apps, photos, vids etc. Disk 1 has only one drive, D,

@whs, even when there two different hard drives?

 

[whs]

Disk 0 holds the C drive with Vista and all my apps, photos, vids etc. Disk 1 has only one drive, D,

@whs, even when there two different hard drives?

To tell you the truth, I missed that part. It is theoretically possible to span a logical drive over 2 physical units, but I would not recommend that.
Why don't you use D as your data partition and move the folders as explained in the video - is that an option?.

 

[radinhouston]

Thanks for the fast advice. Yeah, it's two separate disks. Disk 0, the one with the C drive, which has all my own stuff, also includes E, the system restore program. The other disk has only the D drive, which up to now has been used for automatic backcups. The idea was to use the new external drive H to back up everything that is now on Disk O. That would free Disk 1 (identical to D drive) of any backup function and open its 160 gb for the same uses as C.
It would be nice if C and D could be combined but probably not necessary. For instance, I could assign Vista to send all my videos to one of them and everything else to the other. Something must be done because both C and D are in crisis: D is not accepting any more data and C is about 3/4 full.