Aspire AST690-UP925A 250GB SATA hard disk first drive full and won't go to 2nd

[sistersin]

The Acer C: drive is now full and the Data D: drive is empty, but it is not recognizing it automatically. This computer is my brother's, he bought it new and has it at my house. It came formatted with no disc's and I'm not sure where his books for it are. Can anyone tell me how to activate the second hard drive so I can use itunes and download video, etc.

It would be very much appreciated. My brother uses the computer here but it has been here for at least 3 years maybe and the book is misplaced. He mostly uses it for youtube, facebook, and stuff like that and is less computer educated than I am at tech stuff, which isn't saying much.

Thanks in advance for any help.

 

[Mark56]

Boot into Bios, usually by hitting F8 as soon as the POST screen appears and see if the hard drives are both recognised. If the spare drive does not show in the Bios it either has a fault or it is not correctly connected.

What OS is on the PC.

 

[sistersin]

Boot into Bios

Mark56

Im not sure how to boot into bios. and don't know what OS means really? can you give me more info on that and I'll try to tell you.

Thanks

 

[Mark56]

Sorry I'll try an easier guide. Switch on the PC and immediately start tapping the F2 key on your keyboard. This should take you to the Bios screen. Bios layouts do vary so tricky to give an exact guide but you should find a list of connected devices under Peripherals or Hardware. This should include the hard drives and CD/DVD drives. There will be a guide somewhere on screen to tell you what key to hit to Exit, if it asks if you want to "Exit without Saving" hit "Y". It should then boot back into windows.

Let me know what you find.

Sorry I said use F8 earlier that is for getting into Safe Mode.

 

[sistersin]

Ok now what?

Mark56

I restarted the computer hit f2, then went to the device manager and checked the hardware. This computer when you look at the choices for drives to download stuff like from a digital camera has a c: drive, d: drive, and 5 other drives that are 4 usb drives, and one printer.

But on the device manager for hardware it only shows the 4 usb and the printer plus one listed as ST3250820AS ATA device.

Under computer management it is listed as:

disk 0: 232.88GB online 6.83 GB Healthy (EISA Configuration)

Acer C: Simple basic NTFS 113.20 GB Healthy (System, Boot, Page File, Active, Crash Dump, Primary Partition) Free Space 12.68 GB, Fault Tolerence no, overhead 0%

Data D: Simple basic NTFS 112.85 GB Healthy (Primary Partition) Free Space 112.76 GB, Fault Tolerence no, overhead 0%

The other drives are listed as Disk 1 Removable (F), Disk 2 Rem (G), Disk 3 Rem (H), Disk 4 Rem (I), Disk 5 Rem (J)

Does any of this help figure anything out?

Thanks in advance

 

[Mark56]

As far as I can tell from the details you have given the spare drive is not appearing in Device Manager because it is not marked as Active. You can mark it as active in disc management by right clicking on the drive and selecting "Mark as Active". That should make it accessible.

Do not adjust settings on the other drive.

The discrepancy between the number of drives shown when downloading and when in device manager is simply due to the Active hard drive having two partitions. Drive C and Drive D. When you activate the other drive you will have one more, probably Drive E

Let me know if this works or not.

 

[sistersin]

didn't work

Mark56

I marked it active like you said and it didn't work. In fact, it made it so when the computer shut down it wouldn't boot back up. I had to take it to two different places and ultimately had to buy a new pc and have them transfer files with some super technical program that had to run for over two days to get the files to pull back up and transfer to the new pc. They were going to charge only $120 less to backup file and recover the old pc and were not sure the hard drive would be 100% usable if they could fix the problem of the c and d drive issue. The head tech of 10 years said he has never seen a computer will a d drive with 112 gb of free space set aside.

So, I ended up spending $609 for a new pc which is way better than the old one after adding a special deal, rebate on norton, I'll get $25 back in mail, they are making a recovery disc since they no longer make them and I added a 3 yr in store repair warranty with tech support in US, for about $73 after discount. The pc was reg $529.99 for $399.99 presidents day sale at the last 30 min of the sale. It is a hp 6710F.

We are still waiting for them to finish they are backing it up on a external hard drive I got. Then we hope the old pc will recover with a disk that my brother made when he first got it it had him make it. It says backup disc on it, but I think it will be back to the same split hard drive again if it even works. Unfortunately they do not give you a vista disk so I hope it will be there. My mom bought us each an acer netbook on Sunday they were on sale for $198. That's what I'm using now, I wanted to update you.

 

[Mark56]

It sounds as if that spare drive was faulty or it simply wasn't set up correctly. Simply replacing the drive would have probably cured the problem. There is a feature available from Microsoft, for free, that would let you transfer files from one PC to the other. Having a space (the D drive) set aside for Data is quite normal.

Anyway, sounds like you got a bargain with the new PC and thanks for the update.