QUESTION :
I’ve already allocated about 12GB for the C: drive system restore. I noticed while setting it up that there is also a D: drive.
This is my first time seeing a D: drive and it’s on the Acer laptop I just got. From what I can tell it doesn’t really have anything inside. Yes I’ve made sure to have it show me hidden folders and there was msdownld.tmp which I deleted since it’s just an empty download temporary folder.
The D: drive is also taking up most of the space and downloading stuff still going into the C: drive.
From what I’ve been able to find on forums is that it’s not important and I should just merge the D: drive back into the C: drive. I agree with this but I wanted a little advice before I do so. Don’t want to accidentally break something.
Update: I’ve also looked at disk management and it seems the recovery drive is not in the D: drive before anyone asks that.
ANSWER :
It looks to me that your laptop has actually 2 drives (this is not unusual in mid-range to high-end laptops):
- A fast 120 GB SSD that is home to C:, the recovery partition and the EFI partition (that 100 MB thing)
- A 1 TB regular harddisk (D:) which is slow (compared to the SSD) but which has a lot of space to store whatever you want.
You can’t really merge the 2 drives together (actually you can by making it a hybrid disk, but that is very tricky and not something I would recommend).
Simply install extra software on D:.
You can also re-locate “Documents”, “Downloads”, “Pictures”, “Music” and “Videos” standard folders easily to D: so they won’t fill up the C: drive.
Simply right-click the “Documents” folder in File Explorer and select “Properties” from the menu. In the Properties windows is a Location tab where you can move it to D:.
Same procedure for the other standard folders.