guys listen here i know that this might be a dumb question but

It'll be fine

>>322376
it's ok as long as you make sure of not occupate the entire space on both discs because you might end up having no space for the operative system in case you need to change it

>>322371

No, why would it?
It's on the same drive, just a different partition that is mounted into the system and has the same file system (NTFS). Windows simply calls the partition where the System files are located C, when the system is loading those are loaded into RAM, after that the Windows folder is pretty much not accessed anymore, same with any other program, when executed it is loaded into RAM, the same RAM everything else is in, the partition the files are in is just storage and NTFS system is NTFS-system. NO diffeence.

>>322371
While you still can, move everything from the D drive to the C drive, delete it, and grow the C drive into the space it took up.

There is absolutely no reason to have two partitions, and I have no idea why computers still come like that.

>>322413
.
Quote: "... I have no idea why computers still come like that. "
.
If you routinely save all your personal data files onto such a D:\ partition, then in the event of major problems with the operating system & application software, on the C:\ partition, you can just format (wipe everything off it) and reinstall a new operating system plus all necessary software, and all your personal data is still sitting there on the D:\ partition.

Also, some manufacturers install a "recovery image" of the installed operating system and software, onto the D:\ partition, to allow automated recovery, in the even of trivial problems that cannot be easily solved by their incompetent IT help-desk autists.
--
Majikthise

>>322413

Because it in use makes no difference and it is nice to have your personal files seperated from the system files because as an own partition you can easily wipe or format that one or install another OS on it without first having to backup your personal files or losing them all?

>>322422
1) this is not reddit, you don't need a signature
2) the recovery partition is not assigned a drive letter and the BIOS hides it from the OS when you're not recovering
3) you can clean-install Windows anyway, whether there's one partition or two, and there's no reason to think a windows that scribbles one partition won't also scribble a second.

Partitioning a single drive is retarded; there is no good reason to do it, and people like you reiterate shit reasons they heard rather than using their brains. You used to have to partition FAT16 drives because FAT had a limited number of clusters and couldn't efficiently pack small files into their directory entries. NTFS has no such limitations, and received wisdom that recommends not using just one big partition is simply incorrect.

>>322425
They're already separate from the OS files: the OS is in \Windows\, and your profile and all your documents are in \Users\. You don't need to wipe the partition to clean install on it: just go ahead and install, and the installer moves all the old shit out the way into \Windows.old\.

You're just inconveniencing yourself by making yourself decide ahead of time what size \Windows\ and \Users\ must be limited to.

And for the love of god start doing a proper backup. Then all your worries about wiping your files will go away, because you can get them out the backup at any time.

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>>322377
>>322413
>>322432
The rise of the trolls on /wsr/ is pathetic. Being half right is still half wrong.

>>322376
>It'll be fine
This guy said all OP needed to hear.

>>322431
>the BIOS hides it from the OS when you're not recovering
Sure it does, Bobby.

>>322527
>being half right is still half wrong
>sure it does
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Host_protected_area

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>>322529
He didn't look at the PNG.
>the BIOS hides it from the OS when you're not recovering
>the BIOS hides it
>the BIOS
>hides it
Does that look hidden to you? It isn't on any of my three PC, nor OP's, I suspect. Nice damage control, though.
>all BIOS are the same
>all hard drives have secret Illerminati partitions
>laughinggirls.ld

Most of the information brought up in this thread is completely irrelevant to OP's question. This is not Usenet. Nobody wants to hear anybody's opinion on multiple disk partitions.

>>322608

I also really would have it explained how the BIOS can mask an internal property of a hard disk, something that is only a business of the disk's controller.

>>322608
>it isn't on any of my PCs
>not all BIOSes are the same
So that makes you right some of the time?
Which is half-right?

Oh, wait, I remember. Half-wrong.

You're enjoying the irony, I hope?

>>322632
Or how, if I remove the hard disk from the computer, how the BIOS on the original computer could prevent me from seeing the slack space.

>>322634
You clearly implied that all BIOS hide the recovery partition. I merely showed you that is false. I made no claim that is universal.

I wish you had a trip code so I could filter you.

>>322371
It will be fine, but mind you, many games, if not indeed most, will always add something to your default OS drive, or even just straight up C:, so each game on D: will still eat some space on C:. Some games even assemble themselves in your localuser data, etc, in which case most of the space they eat up will be on C:, even if you install them to D:, and of course, a few games give you no choice in the matter. All your temporary internet cache and the like, similarly, tend to default to C:. NVidia loves to leave copies of every version of your drivers there too, which will eat up that remaining 8GB pretty fast.

With a good partitioning program, if you empty out D:, you might be able to resize the C: partition to fill the entire drive and eliminate it.

You can virtual-link folders, and thus move the spam that games put in the users folder to D:, though this may not be the easiest thing for a non-computer literate person to do. The only GUI tool I know of for this isn't all that intuitive.

Next time you install your OS though, undo that partition setup - there's no good reason to do that save maybe in a multi-OS situation.

>>322634
>You're enjoying the irony, I hope?
Also, that's not irony.
It would be "poetic justice", if you were right.

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>>322632
It tells the disk to pretend to be smaller than it is, and the OS doesn't tell it to change back because it has an interest in not overwriting its own recovery system.

The facility to do this has been in all ATA compliant hard disks (which is to say, all hard disk in all consumer PCs) since 2001.

You surely know all this, though, because it would be stupid to write a load of crap speculating about how something worked instead of just reading an article already linked in this thread.

>>322641
>he thinks there's only one other person ITT

>>322635
If you tell it to, the disk remembers the HPA setting across reboots.

This, also, is explained in the ATA standard.

Maybe read next time you should RTFA, instead of claiming that things that have been around for decades must be impossible because you can't think how to do them.

>>322637
Nope, you asserted that it never did.

Which was ironic, given what you'd just said about being right in some cases.

>>322647
Again, never claimed it was impossible. It is, however, unlikely that a consumer PC would be configured like that. I then checked three PCs, from three different manufacturers (Acer, Dell and HP), and none of them hide the recovery partition.

And what's this about reboots? I said mount the hard drive on another computer.

"Using Linux, there are various ways to detect the existence of an HPA. "

>He didn't read the article himself.

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>>322652
>ironic

>>322652
The first occurrence of the word "never" appears in your post, Bobby.

Do you own a fedora, by the way?

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>>322641
That's not the BIOS, that's a hidden partition function.

It doesn't "tell the disk it's smaller than it is", that space is in use by the recovery partition. It's usually hidden, or at least read only, so the user doesn't accidentally fsk with it. It also tends to be fairly small.

In this case, it sounds like OP has a disk divided with an open partition, for no real reason.

>>322425
It makes a huge difference, cuz if your OS drive runs out of space, you are SOL, and with Windows the OS can grow like wildfire - especially since every-other-program, including games and caches, are going to stick shit in the appdata and my documents, which are on the OS partition.

It isn't unusual for Windows, just in itself, to grow to 300% of the installation size, even when cleaned regularly. Add the user data, and, well shit.

ishygitydiggity

See this pic? This is a visualization of folders on an OS drive. In this case it's been trimmed fairly well, aside from a few programs that need to run fast in the "Program Files" folders. In this case it was done because the OS needed to be on the fastest drive (and at the time, SSD's were still pretty small). When this OS was originally installed, this was 17GB. Three months later and it's 52GB, after lots of trimming, and redirecting "My Documents" to another drive.

>>322655

It also sound incredibly useless to mask sth like that. That just screams accidental overwriting. mcuh better to TELL me that this is a recovery partition, then I'll keep it untouched, otherwise...

>>322660
Who are you replying to? My whole point is that you can readily determine where your PC's recovery partition is using the disk partition tool, provided it hasn't intentionally been hidden, which 3/3 in my house isn't.

>>322655
There's an NTFS flag to mark partitions as hidden. It's not like super-encrypted hidden or anything, even the basic disk management will display them, they just aren't assigned a drive letter in Windows Explorer.

It isn't unusual for manufacturers to hide recovery partitions in this fashion (seen it plenty of times), but they rarely eat more than a few gigabytes. It isn't some conspiracy to clandestinely eat drive space or anything.

Occasionally I'll come across a computer that wasn't partitioned well, and actually has unpartitioned space though - usually not much, but enough to irk me to fix it.

t. data recovery guy

>>322669
Aughhh. I know this! I'm the guy that posed the pictures of exactly what you're describing???

>>322671
> It is, however, unlikely that a consumer PC would be configured like that. I then checked three PCs, from three different manufacturers (Acer, Dell and HP), and none of them hide the recovery partition.
I'm saying it's extremely likely, and pretty damned common.

Though I should have also prefixed that with an "NTG, but..."

>>322664

I think we'd need IDs by now. With 10 different posters that starts to become confusing

>>322675
I used a sig on another thread and got ripped for it.

>>322655
>what's this about reboots
RTFA.

The state of the HPA is stored on the disk, not in the BIOS. Thus when the HPA is set to non-volatile, it persists no matter how often the disk is rebooted, or which computer it's booted in.

>Linux can unlock it
So can the BIOS. Neither do without you telling them to, because they rightly assume that whatever set the HBA knew what they were doing. It's like the write-protect tab on an SD card, which is just a piece of plastic and doesn't actually prevent the reader writing to the card.

I don't know why you were expecting the HBA to be impossible to unset: what use would a recovery partition be if there were no way to access it?

>>322660
I'd think putting the partition inside the HPA would be enough of a clue for most people, but there's nothing stopping you from labelling the volume "recovery", or making its partition type "recovery partition" when unlocking the HPA.

>>322655
Lenovo does.

>>322659
No, it literally tells the disk to shrink, and the disk shrinks. It's all there in the Wikipedia article, or if you don't trust Wikipedia you can download the ATA spec and look up "host protected area" yourself. Not all manufacturers use the HPA, but when they do, this is how it works. Your customers can boot off a windows installer, delete all their partitions, then break their PC and still be able to recover it because the while time the recovery partition has been hidden from them.

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>>322675
>>322676
Welcome to 4chan.

You'll get used to it. Or at least, you'd better.

>>322675
No, you just need to consider individual posts as individual posts, and reply to what's actually in them. If you don't like people being anonymous, this isn't really the place for you.

>>322677
>Lenovo does.
And that's just one more reason to never buy from them. They've already been caught doing shit.

>>322677
I've seen some old Dells hide simply recovery utilities in the HPA (~20MB), but I've yet to see a whole recovery partition stuck in there. You can get at that with half-decent partition software (or even AOMEI), though I'm not sure if, off hand, Windows Disk Manager will spot it.

Then again, somebody just posted a picture of a ~25GB recovery partition, and this just rustled my jimmies.

>>322678
I was here when 4chan was good.

>>322681
AIUI, Windows is intentionally designed not to spot it.

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>>322683
4chan was never good.

(I miss crackychan though.)

>>322681
>somebody just posted a picture of a ~25GB recovery partition
Courtesy of Dell, doncha know.

>>322685
>4chan was never good.
My brotha.

I could care less about trolls, but thread-level tripcodes kept the argument losers from saying "That wasn't me!"

>>322686
Dell has been rustling my jimmies for many a year now...

>>322680
Yeah... Go to >>>/g/ and shit on Thinkpads - see what happens.

>>322692
You don't have to read it, the URL says it all.

https://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/2422015/lenovo-caught-installing-bloatware-again-with-windows-bios-backdoor

Thinkpad confirmed botnet.

>>322692
>Thinkpad confirmed botnet.

>>https://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/2422015/lenovo-caught-installing-bloatware-again-with-windows-bios-backdoor
>However its ThinkPad range is not affected

>>322692
>You don't have to read it
Learned nothing from this thread?

>>322703
>I think we'd need IDs by now. With 10 different posters that starts to become confusing
Ya know, not even IDs are going to help us, if you link the wrong darned post.

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[greentext]mfw this fucking thread[/greentext]

>>322703
>>However its ThinkPad range is not affected
Manufacturer injects all but one product with malware.
And you think there's no chance they might.
God bless your soul.

>>322686

Dell is a shit, A SHIT!

>>322879
>is
Welcome to 4chan.

>>322880

Who cares, it's a weeb meme anyway.

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>>322897
>It's a weeb meme anyway

>>322905

[spoiler]FOR YOU[/spoiler]

>>322905
>implying 4chan is what it was 12 years ago