Chances are that D: is a protected Recovery partition but it does seem very large for that. Look in the owners manual and see if it mentions anything about returning the system to Factory settings using a Recovery Partition. If it does not mention this and you were supplied with a set of Recovery discs then you can use the Partition for Data storage and software.

You can combine them but it is usefull to have your data in a seperate partition so if you need to re-install the OS your data will be untouched. You should not rely on this though and should always keep backups of important data on an external source, just in case something goes wrong. Hard drives always wear out, eventually.

 

It's not a recovery partition. It's just another data drive. I have an Asus EeePC, and I had the same drive setup before I wiped it and loaded Windows 7. You can either live with it or use a partitioning utility to combine them. Be sure to back up your data first.

 

Recovery involves a USB drive, presumably from something you would have to make by downloading something. There's no CD.

Well if it IS a "data drive", having a 107 GB "OS Drive" seems a bit excessive...at least for a netbook.

And Windows seems to put your "Documents" on the primary drive anyway...I guess unless you go through the steps to shortcut some folders..which doesn't seem too intuitive. It's really strange, because if you say have a bunch of video files or some other massive library, it may take up more than 50% of your HD and with a C/D, you have to split them up.

 

It won't take too many installations to use the 100 GB's on the system drive. Mine is 157 GB's used space, for example. Space gets used on the system drive even for programs installed to a different drive. But 100 seems good if you don't plan to install too many programs.

If you change partitions in any way, you will lose your copy of Windows on the hard drive. So, unless you have recovery disks, be careful. You could make a drive image before you change any partitions so you can use that if you need to restore the system to a new hard drive or factory defaults.

Merging partitions is a fine idea, so long as you have some way to recover. You could also merge all the partitions together and then make a disk image to save as your "restore disks", either on actual disks or on another hard drive.