My laptop HD

So I have an Acer laptop. When I goto my computer it says I have a C drive and a D drive. Each are 40GB. So I have decided that I was to add more space. I took off the back of my laptop to see how ard it was to remove the drives and stuff. I get 1 drive out no problem and realize that it is an 80GB drive by Toshiba. I don't know why it would be partitioned into 2 drives. Also, my Vista came preloaded on my laptop and there was no disk that came with it. If I buy a brand new drive, will I have to buy a new operating system as well? I still have the key sticker on the back of the laptop. Comments? Suggestions?

I know I could get an external, but I don't want the hassle of carrying it around with the laptop.

A lot of computers come pre-partitioned into 2 partitions. Laptops RARELY have more than one internal drive. The idea is that one is for the OS, programs, etc, and the other partition is for media.

You should be able to reinstall Windows with the serial key on the bottom of your laptop. You'll just have to download a copy of Windows and burn it to a disk (which is legal).

If you want to keep your old just stuff (viruses and all) you could just copy the old drive to the new (larger) drive, and then use a software like PartitionMagic to resize the partitions to take up the remaining space.

sweet. Thanks for the help!

[quotea3f37a9bae="gafdpc"]You should be able to reinstall Windows with the serial key on the bottom of your laptop. You'll just have to download a copy of Windows and burn it to a disk (which is legal).[/quotea3f37a9bae]
Know that this is almost never easy though. There are keys that only work with certain OEM versions, so you'll need to test on another pc beforehand (if you have a spare...). I had a hell of a time trying to do this very thing on my gf's laptop.

80GB for a Vista machine sounds awfully small -- is this a netbook?

The CD key on the laptop sticker is almost certainly NOT the key that was used when the OS was installed by the OEM. If you use the key on the sticker you will have to activate it, and could run into possible issues as hehehhehe points out. Use a key finder tool like Belarc Advisor or Magic Jellybean Key Finder to pull the currently key. It should be different than the sticker key, and should not require activation.

However you don't need to reinstall Windows to take advantage of the extra partition. Some (most? all?) versions of Vista come with a partition manager built-in to the Disk Management plug-in that you can use to resize partitions non-destructively. Or you can use a free tool such as gparted. Basically you want to delete the unused D partition to free the space, then grow the C partition to fill the entire drive.

Not a netbook. Acer Travelmate.

[quote475e323929="dmorris68"]
However you don't need to reinstall Windows to take advantage of the extra partition. Some (most? all?) versions of Vista come with a partition manager built-in to the Disk Management plug-in that you can use to resize partitions non-destructively. Or you can use a free tool such as gparted. Basically you want to delete the unused D partition to free the space, then grow the C partition to fill the entire drive.[/quote475e323929]

Isn't he replacing the whole drive?

[quote8f7619d73f="JennyWren"][quote8f7619d73f="dmorris68"]
However you don't need to reinstall Windows to take advantage of the extra partition. Some (most? all?) versions of Vista come with a partition manager built-in to the Disk Management plug-in that you can use to resize partitions non-destructively. Or you can use a free tool such as gparted. Basically you want to delete the unused D partition to free the space, then grow the C partition to fill the entire drive.[/quote8f7619d73f]

Isn't he replacing the whole drive?[/quote8f7619d73f]
shrug I dunno. He just said he needed more space, and discovered his drive was split. So my suggestion was to join the partitions to give himself an immediately 40GB of extra space. In which case he doesn't need to reinstall Windows. Even if he replaces the drive, he doesn't necessarily have to reinstall Windows from scratch -- just use a drive imaging tool to image the drive to a USB HDD, network drive, etc., and then restore to the new drive. DriveImage XML is a free drive imaging tool, among others. Personally I use True Image, but it's nicht frei.

I don't see why joining the partitions would give any extra space - that space isn't missing or anything. Why couldn't he just use all 80GB now? I assumed that's what he was doing, and that 80GB wasn't enough (implied by him saying "if I buy a brand new drive"). There's no need to mess with the partitions if 80GB total is enough, unless for some reason he wants to distribute the number of gigs per partition differently.

I was going on the assumption he never used D drive, or used little of it, and needed more space overall. He thought he had two drives because he had a C & D. He went to remove the drives and discovered that he has only one 80GB drive. We explained that manufacturers often split a drive like that, and I suggested that if he joined the partitions he would NOW have 80GB altogether instead of 40 each that he had before, which might be enough to tide him over.

I do agree that 80GB is nothing these days -- you can't fit many pr0... er, I mean, MMA videos on there -- so he should look out for a deal on a bigger drive, but this would be a quick fix to give him a little space until then (again, assuming he hasn't already filled both 40GB partitions).