Computer shows two drives but there is only one

[averagelaptopuser]

I purchased a laptop a little over a year ago that came with a 1tb hard drive but in file explorer under this pc it says that I have two hard drives. I was not having any trouble with this until now because the one of the drives is almost full. The one I have been storing everything in is the os install drive (the C: drive) with 558gb of storage and another (D: drive) with 352gb of storage. Not only is this not a whole terabyte but I am also not looking forward too needing to deal with reorganizing things so that all of my steam files stay on the same drive. Any input would be greatly appreciated.

 

[JaredDM]

It's called a partition, your drive is just divided up. Your OS is almost certainly installed on the C:, so you just need to move all data to the C:, then delete the second partition and expand the C: partition. This can all be accomplished in Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Disk Management.

As to the size being smaller, keep in mind that the way HDD manufacturers calculate size and the way Microsoft calculates size is different, so they will always appear smaller to the OS. HDD manufacturers say a Tb is 1Billion bytes, (which is technically true), whereas M$ says it's 1024bytes = 1Kb, 1Kb x 1024 = 1Mb, 1Mb x 1024 = 1Gb etc. It's all a matter of whether you're multiplying by 1000 (difficult for software since a sector is 512 bytes and that doesn't divide into 1000) or by 1024.

Plus there's likely a system restore partition hidden in there that's used in case you ever need to restore the laptop to original condition.

 

[averagelaptopuser]

It's called a partition, your drive is just divided up. Your OS is almost certainly installed on the C:, so you just need to move all data to the C:, then delete the second partition and expand the C: partition. This can all be accomplished in Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Disk Management.

As to the size being smaller, keep in mind that the way HDD manufacturers calculate size and the way Microsoft calculates size is different, so they will always appear smaller to the OS. HDD manufacturers say a Tb is 1Billion bytes, (which is technically true), whereas M$ says it's 1024bytes = 1Kb, 1Kb x 1024 = 1Mb, 1Mb x 1024 = 1Gb etc. It's all a matter of whether you're multiplying by 1000 (difficult for software since a sector is 512 bytes and that doesn't divide into 1000) or by 1024.

Plus there's likely a system restore partition hidden in there that's used in case you ever need to restore the laptop to original condition.

thank you this was very helpful but now the C drive wont merge with the allocated space and there is another partition separating them.

 

[TechGuy56]

The best way to handle partitions and resizing or moving is to use a utility like EASEUS Partition Manager, they have a free version for personal use. http://www.partition-tool.com/personal.htm
If you use that, you can correct your partitions and merge free space to use as much as possible.