Hard drive question-- partitioned or separate drive

I have a C drive and a D drive. How do you tell if these are actually 2 hard drives or if it's one drive partitioned.

Also, what is the purpose of a partitioned drive?

If indeed it is partitioned, is there any way to save stuff from D drive when the hard drive fails or since the whole drive is dead, is it gone as well?

Thanks in advance!

The advantage of having the OS on one partition and your files on the other is: if you run into a problem and need to reformat windows, it will wipe the whole of C:\, but D:\ will be left alone.

Belahzur wrote:

The advantage of having the OS on one partition and your files on the other is: if you run into a problem and need to reformat windows, it will wipe the whole of C:\, but D:\ will be left alone.

So, like if Windows is installed on C:\ , then you recommend all other files like pictures, videos, documents, etc. be put on D:\ in case Windows needs to be reformatted?

What about installing Software? Still install it on C:\ or install it on D:\?

But, what about if you have a hard drive failure....does that mean that everything on D is gone as well?

Oh, and how can you tell if it's actually a separate hard drive or if it is partitioned?

Seperate hardrive will mean having two HD's inside your machine, take the lid and have a peek. (DO NOT touch the inside of the machine if it's left on, you'll fry it otherwise)

If it's partition, there will only be 1 HD.

So, like if Windows is installed on C:\ , then you recommend all other files like pictures, videos, documents, etc. be put on D:\ in case Windows needs to be reformatted?

Bingo.

If you have an OEM computer and have never partitioned your hard drive before, then the D:\ drive is most likely to be the recovery partition, which I would not want to touch.

Most of the time people who partition their hard drive will store all their data on D:\ if the OS is installed on C:\, so you would not need to worry if you need to do a sudden format. If say, the OS crashes turns unusable overnight, you can format it without worrying to lose any data.