Personal Computers Questions

How come I cannot see both partitions on my hard drive?

by on September 15, 2010

Q: I have an Acer Aspire 8920 and I’m having some problems with the drive. It’s a 320 GB drive, partitioned, and it use to show both drives in the directory. Now it doesn’t. Any way of getting that back?

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7 Responses to “How come I cannot see both partitions on my hard drive?”
  1.  

    Take a look at disk management.

    Right click on ‘Computer’ click manage, then Storage > Diskmanager

    You should see your partitions here, and any details on if anything is goofed up. Right clicking on the partition will give you options to setup allocation and lettering and stuff, so I’ll look at that.

     

    Mark (Uber Geek) says: on September 15, 2010 at 8:49 am

  2.  

    Thanks for the reply. I have tried that, and it does show the partition, however, I’m not able to do anything more than look at it. I am unable to assign a drive number to it, or anything. Any suggestions?

     

    Paulbc (Newbie) says: on September 15, 2010 at 10:56 am

  3.  

    What data does it show for the partition?
    What happens when you right click on the drive and select Change Drive Letters and paths?

     

    Mark (Uber Geek) says: on September 15, 2010 at 11:44 am

  4.  

    It shows up as a healthy OEM partition. When you right click on it, though, it only gives me a help option. On the lettered drive (C) I can access the options menu…

     

    Paulbc (Newbie) says: on September 15, 2010 at 12:01 pm

  5.  
    Picked as best answer

    Okay, OEM Partition. This part of the hard drive is reserved for system recovery files and remains hidden so that the contents don’t get messed up if you need to do a system restore.

    I strongly suggest you leave this as it is as you will otherwise risk wrecking your computer’s restore partition.

    If you don’t care if the system restore and want the hard drive space you can follow these instructions at your own risk: http://defaultreasoning.wordpress.com/2009/05/29/unhide-the-recovery-partition-on-a-basic-disk-with-diskpart/

    Again, I strongly suggest you leave this alone.

     

    Mark (Uber Geek) says: on September 15, 2010 at 12:46 pm

  6.  

    Okay thanks for that. Strange though that it use to show at one time. But does that mean that I’ll only have access to half the storage on the computer. If the current C: drive fills up, will I have to start removing programs, etc.?

     

    Paulbc (Newbie) says: on September 15, 2010 at 3:32 pm

  7.  

    Yes.

    I’d suggest doing that kind of thing regularly anyway.

    Uninstall software you never run
    Delete files you don’t need
    move data to external drives

    and of course have good backups!

    the free program ccleaner http://www.piriform.com/ can help clean up drive space as well

     

    Mark (Uber Geek) says: on September 15, 2010 at 3:42 pm