"My Computer" Lists 2 HD's, but my computer only has 1??

Today I opend up my computer to vacuum some vents and stuff because they were starting to clogg up with dust....

Anyways, I was inspecting the inside to find out some information about my motherboard when I noticed that I only have 1 Hard Drive inside my case, with a empty space for another Hard Drive, but "My Computer" in Windows lists 2 Hard Drives - C and D.
Just curious, but what is up with this?

Ive been having some problems with IE6 (my thread can be found Here ).
And I've decided that it looks like I need to reinstall Windows XP to fix the problem. Which will require me formatting Drive C. Will this have any affect on the large amount content that I have in "Drive D", since they are basicly located on the same drive, I'm worried.

Sony Vaio RX-881
Windows XP Home
The label on the Hard Drive said IBM, but I forgot the get the specific info, other than the lable lists slightly over 123gig total space.

Sony listed this computer to have 120gig 7200rpm HD space, but "Drive C" lists 14.9gig total space, and "Drive D" lists 100gig total space.

Thanks

Just curious, but how good are the IBM drives?, like are the dependable, etc? This one makes a weird noise here and there.(I think its the HD that makes the noise)

Thanks again

Your single physical hard drive has been partitioned into 2 logical hard drives. This is very common practice to split up hard disks into more manageable smaller chunks. Assuming you have windows and Program Files on drive C, you can format it with no problem, everything on D will remain intact (unless you mess up somthing yourself ).
You do know that you will have to reinstall almost all programs too if you make a clean start with Windows?

You have a 120 GB hard drive resulting in about 115 gigs of uasable space. This is quite normal. IBM drives had a big reliability problem before, but your drive seems to be newer than that. What sort of a weird noise is it, could it be described as clicks or clanks?

Hmm, really doesnt sound like either clicks or clanks....more like the sound a record would make if it was beind moved back and forth on the record player. Seems to always make the exact seem noise, and last the exact seem length. I'll try to listen to it a lot more closely next time it does it, I usually catch the noise once or so a week, at random times.

"You do know that you will have to reinstall almost all programs too if you make a clean start with Windows?"

This only applies to programs installed on "Drive C" right? Because I have most of my stuff installed on "Drive D" (I somehow knew that was a good idea) just incase something went wrong with "Drive C". Most of what is on C is like system stuff, updates, just a couple programs, and games, but nothing major, and nothing that wont take a few minutes to back-up the stuff I want to keep, or transfer over to "Drive D".

....so in other words, in a format/clean start, everything currently on "Drive C" is lost, and everything on "Drive D" is kept (unless I mess something up )?

Thanks

only thing is since it's one drive if something 'went wrong' with C, D would be gone too.

as for:
....so in other words, in a format/clean start, everything currently on "Drive C" is lost, and everything on "Drive D" is kept (unless I mess something up )?
that is correct. you can reformat the C partition and not lose D, just be careful while doing it.

All your installed programs will stay where they are, but they keep their settings and registration information in Windows registry. If you kill Windows you lose all settings for your programs and Windows will also forget that you had any of them installed. Most of them will not run properly afterwards. Especially things made by more paranoid companies (Microsoft Office is a good example).
Keeping your programs installed on a different partition is good in the sense that you will have a much cleaner (and faster) system partition and in case of disaster you can keep all the saved games, documents etc.

Ok, thanks a lot guys.