I have one hard drive but disk management shows 2 'disks'. Please help

[mathullan1905]

Hey,
I have a dell xps l702x and when I went into disk management, it showed that I have 2 'disks', when there is only one hard disk drive inside. I am not good at opening up laptops but I do not think there are two hard disks inside the laptop. They are evenly split in size, this is shown using command prompt > list disk. The only method I have to merge or change these disks is by using command prompt from boot. I have no idea how to do this. I can't delete the disks, but I have removed all the volumes and partitions, including the recovery media that was there. So now there are only 2 disks, disk 0 and disk 1. I just want one disk. Does anyone know how to do this using command prompt from boot? I am using an OEM Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit installation disk to boot up to the installation screen.

 

[alexkrest]

its called a disk partition

 

[navalweaponsofficer]

Why do you think you have only 1 HDD in the computer? What is the size of the two drives (in GB)? That is a 17" laptop that has 2, 2.5" HDD mounting locations. Check the BIOS/UEFI and see how many HDD's are detected by the BIOS/UEFI. If two drives are shown in there then you have two HDD's. Another option is to remove the HDD cover on the bottom and see if you have two HDD's. I am pretty sure you have two drives

If you have two drives the only thing you can do to combine them is to see if your BIOS/UEFI supports RAID (it should) then put the drives in RAID 0. Keep in mind it you do this when one drive fails you loose all of your data.

What is your reason for wanting to have one volume? if we better know your reason we can provide you with other options.

 

[mathullan1905]

It looks like that computer came with 2 500GB drives. you have 2 separate drives.

Alright thanks so much. How can I make the most out of both hard drives?

 

[navalweaponsofficer]

I updated my post with additional information please review that and see if that answers your question.

You can get the most out of both drives with them separate. They will have marginally better performance in RAID 0 and it will become one volume.

If you are looking for a performance gain buy having them as one drive going to RAID 0 is not worth the risk.

If you just want one drive there is really no benefit to be gained by going that route.

If you want improved performance I would recommend a 120GB SSD and a 1TB HDD combined should cost about $150 USD the computer will feel much faster that way. SSD OS and applications, HDD data and media files.

 

[jokermaycry]

the official configuration of the dell xps l702x is two hard disk (500GB*2), if you want to merge them, two ways
1. like "navalweaponsofficer" said, create the raid 0, but you need a hardware raid array
2. upgrade your os to Windows 8.1, then create the storage space (you could also know it as storage poor) ,then you could merge them into one in logical.