older laptop with dual drives

[Garbanzo Dude]

I have 2003 (PCG-GRT170) Vaio with two hard drives. My C:/ drive where windows is almost full....there is a ton of space on my D:/ drive. I want to install some new programs and download more music. If I try to move files through my computer it says I may lose the files?? Can someone tell me how use the second drive?

[Nstart]

Does the computer itself actually has two physical hard drives. Or is one hard drive partitioned into two separate logical drives?

There are very few computers from that era that sold notebooks with 2 physical hard drives. Most manufacturers logically partition the hard drive into two drives that the end user sees.

[Garbanzo Dude]

Not sure??? Have not opened it....but if that case is there extra storage on drive d: and how can can I used it?

[Nstart]

Here is the easiest way to check. Restart your computer and go into your BIOS. I believe you have to press F2 during the BIOS boot to enter it on a Sony (but I could be wrong).

Once you are in the BIOS, look for something called Hard drive(s) or Hardware. Go to that section and look for how many physical hard drives are actually installed in the computer (I am willing to bet it is just one).

If you have a single physical drive, then combining the two logical partitions (like a C and D drive) is pretty straight forward. The easiest way to do this would be to do a clean install of the computer. When you install windows (I presume windows XP?) you will be asked at the beginning where you want to install the new operating system. You will be given the option to delete all partitions or install on top of a previous one. This is when you delete all partitions and windows will create a single partition for you.

The second way (if you don't want to reinstall the entire computer) would be to use a partitioning program like these (they are free):

Cute Partition Manager
http://www.brothersoft.com/cute-part...ger-52388.html

Partition Logic
http://www.brothersoft.com/partition-logic-60493.html

I haven't had to do this in years, but when I did do it, I used Partition Magic. It isn't free, but at the time I had a free copy so I used it anyway.

Using any partitioning software, you just have to combine the two logical drives into one. In your case, you would combine the D drive into the C drive, and this would give you a single hard drive with all the free space.

Now, if you have two physical hard drives, it becomes a little bit more difficult to combine them into one drive. I can go into detail about this if you have two physical hard drives, but I really doubt you do.

[DSM4Life]

If you have two partitions and not two physical drives and decided to use a third party program to combine the to be warned, you could lost all data. I have used the popular program Partition Magic to so the simple task of merging two partitions and it merged them all right but after i was done i had no data at all. Just be careful and always backup any important files before you play around with your data.

p.s
If you have two physical drives in the laptop then there is no need to combine the two. When you go to install a program it will ask you where you want the program to be installed. By default it will install in the c:\doc\username\program files \ (program name) simple change the install path to reflect which harddrive you want to install it two (by changing drive letter) and the program will be installed on the second drive.

[Garbanzo Dude]

Thank you both for the advice......I'm going to burn and back up the important files and give it a shot....