My 11 year old niece got an Acer Aspire3628 for Christmas. We were trying to upgrade WOW to WOW Burning Crusade. We kept getting an error message that she didn't have enough space, although this is supposed to be a 40 gig hd. As I was investigating, I saw that there are two hd's. Acer C: and Acerdate D:

Acer C: Used Space: 9.92 Free Space: 6.4 Total Size: 16.4

Acerdata D: Used Space 2.57 Free Space: 16.9 Total Size: 16.9

Why did Acer decide to partition the drives like this? How do I use the space on Drive D:? Can I merge the two drives into one without reformatting? It's just sort of ridiculous imho to split the hard drives like this.

Any ideas or information will be appreciated!

As to the overall drive size Windows will always see less than the hardware manufacturer as they use different measures. Windows detecting a total of 34gb is equivalent to a hardware's 40gb.

Many OEM installs put the Recovery disk onto a partition in order to spare the expense of a CD (trusting that the hard drive itself does not fail).

This partition is usually Hidden and Not usually half of the hard drive so this partitioning is a bit weird.

There are tools to rearrange partitions but they will destroy all data on the second partition. If that partition does contain a Recovery system and if you do not have a disk then you will be deleting your recovery options.

This is such a tool: http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php

When you install a program choose the Custom or Manual (or Not Recommended) method so that you can place the program where you want it. Then send it to the freer partition.

Thanks for the response, and I'll check out that tool, although I'm not sure I'm savvie enough to attempt it. If her mother and I had known that Acer had the hard drive set-up this way, we would have chosen another brand.

Have u check that tool?
did it solved ur problem?
if there was any problem u can use Disk Director utility.
It can resize/split/merge without losing data.
Besides, it has recovery expert feature (it can recovery accidentally deleted data).