SSD HDD split into 2 'disks'

terrorvision101 · Aug 14, 2014

Hi,

I have a little EEE PC 901, which according to the manufactures specs has a single 12GB HDD. However through computer management, and easeus I see two separate physical disks. One is 4GB which is my xp primary drive and the second is 8GB.

What I want to is merge the two together so the system runs a lot faster. I am currently having problems where even youtube wont work as the temporary files fill up the partition and crash chrome. The disk size simply isn't big enough for XP the few programs I use and actual usage.

If there is no way to merge these drives, then perhaps there is a way to move my XP installation to the 8GB drive? I have already tried using easeus and the windows standard but with no success. I also have no CD drive, or XP installation CD with which to re-install (plus with the tiny HDd I can't download the file online!

Any help with this would be seriously appreciated.

WyomingKnott · Aug 14, 2014

The following will work in theory. However, do not try this without a full image backup of both partitions to an external drive. That way, if anything goes wrong you don't lose your stuff. There's a simpler workaround that may work for you; I will present it last.

If you open Disk Management, in the picture section on the bottom you should see one drive with two "partitions." The first will be 4 GB and have your OS on it; the second might be your D drive and I have no idea what is on it.

Process:
1) Full image backup of existing drive - not partitions, the two "disks" that you see, but drive. Easeus ToDo backup works for me and is free.
2) Another external backup - file copies or a file backup of everything on the D drive. We're going to delete that D drive.
3) Delete the D drive. This involves the Disk Manager and more detailed instructions if this is new to you.
4) "Expand" the C partition to cover the entire physical drive. Win7 does this through Disk Manager; I don't remember if XP does. If not, there are free third-party tools.
5) Pray and reboot. If this works, the machine with come up with one drive with a lot of free space.
6) Create directories to hold stuff that used to be on your D drive and restore the files to them.
7) Any program that was used to finding data on the D drive will fail to find its data. Any program that you had installed on the D drive will not run and must be reinstalled.

==============================

Simpler workaround: You can use system settings to put the system temp space on D , and configure Chrome to put its temp space on D .

terrorvision101 · Aug 14, 2014

WyomingKnott :

Hi and thanks for your quick answer.

The main problem with this is that my D: drive is on 'disk 1' while the C: drive is on 'disk 0' I can easily create and delete partitions on disk 1, creating and deleting D: but this doesn't open up an ability to expand C:. It is like the two drives are separate physical drives.

As far as backing up, I have practically nothing stored on here, so no worries there. I think I've lost all the data I had saved when I was playing about this morning"

Any ideas on how to combine the drives? Thanks again

WyomingKnott · Aug 14, 2014

Can you show me what's in the Disk Manager? I sincerely doubt that you have one 4 GB physical drive and one 8 GB physical drive. I'm hoping that there are two partitions on one drive, but what you wrote above seems to contradict it. Maybe that model has a couple of flash cards and not an HDD?

If it's two separate drives, you would have to play around with dynamic volumes in Windows to combine them, and it will be a pain.

But the product page shows that it comes with either a 12 GB or a 16 GB SSD.

terrorvision101 · Aug 14, 2014

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0By4sIFrI8AbpTjdVVEdLZ2p3RDQ/edit?usp=sharing

Sorry it's a mess...

As far as I know it's a single hdd, I checked the specs on the ASUS website, but it is possible that they have included 2 in here for some reason. I know the drive(s) are SSD which may explain there being two

WyomingKnott · Aug 14, 2014

I'm having a problem with that link; I'll try it later on a different network.

Alabalcho · Aug 14, 2014

The reason for two partitions of EEE901 is that smaller 4GB disk is much faster (and therefore dedicated to OS) than the other 12GB drive. Back when EEE901 was introduced, SSDs were much more expensive than they are today, therefore the split.

Windows XP does not support for "span volumes". And even if it did, you will need to reinstall the OS from the scratch. Without a CD drive you will have hard time doing (or anything else).

You will find videos about how to upgrade the disk on that netbook, but I would not spend a cent on that.

terrorvision101 · Aug 14, 2014

Try this one - http://tinypic.com/r/4vkbo2/8

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SSD HDD split into 2 'disks'

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