[jephree]

What are you using to view this? Disk Management? Or?

I would guess that this is Acer's hidden Recovery Partition but am just guessing. If so this partition would be @ 2GB.

[paulthomasno6]

Sorry about the delay in the answer, I was posting from work earlier.
I thought I was using Disk Management, but this shows the third sector as 0 - as in zero. But its capacity is 18Gb.
So what's hiding in the hidden Recovery Partition?

[jephree]

Some manufacturers, Acer included, essentially put the XP disk onto a hidden partition in case of the need for a reinstall. This alleviates their need to supply a CD. There is usually a hotkey that will boot this partition in the case of a failure of XP booting.

But if this partition is 18GB then I am doubting that this is the case. Did the computer come with an Acer XP CD?

Can you open this partition or in any way view its' contents?

[paulthomasno6]

I don't think I can open it. Computer Management tells me that it's got an EISA configuration and that it's healthy.
As for disks, I didn't get an original XP disk, but I did get a Microsoft pamphlet and 3 Acer recovery disks.


I think this space might be reserved for Acer's eRecovery feature, which does away with the need for hard disks. However, the eManagement screen says it hasn't been installed. So that's 20GB locked up for no good reason, it seems.


I can't believe I typed 'hard disks' when I meant 'recovery disks.' Oh dera me.

[jephree]

I do see that the Acer EISA partition is the Recovery Partition for XP as well as the default Acer drivers.

If you are assured that the Recovery disks you have contain the same data (XP and drivers) you could remove that partition with GParted.

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php

If you choose to do so I would first off review your manual as well as view the contents of your disks (CD's) as deleting this partition will remove what should be your system (XP and drivers) backup.

Yet again I have no idea why it is so large.

[paulthomasno6]

Gparted looks interesting, but I think for the time being I'll leave that partition be. It can be my disk space 'emergency fund'.
Thanks for your help and ideas, jephree. I'll close this one now and let you get back to the people with the real problems.