Why do the same programs appear on both drives C and D?

scherz0 · Feb 9, 2022

1. I never deliberately installed programs on my D. Thus why do some programs appear on both C and D?

2. How can I harmlessly remove the duplicated (on both C and D) programs from D? Please see screen shot below.

3. As you can see below, I have merely 1 Windows installed.

andrewlen · Feb 10, 2022

Hi, it looks to me like the D drive had a Windows installation on it at some point before it was turned into a slave disk. I see a Windows NT folder on there as well.

I would suggest you physically disconnect the D drive by opening the case and pulling both the SATA and power cables from it, with the machine disconnected from any power first, of course.

Note that I'm assuming D is a secondary physical HDD and not just a C SSD system drive partition. Providing that's the case, then I would turn the computer back on with the D drive's cables disconnected and if everything still boots and works fine, then you could just turn the machine off and disconnect from power again, plug its SATA and power cables back in, then boot the machine back up and format it in NTFS. Be sure you back up anything you've stored on D that you may want to keep before formatting, of course.

BTW... You're not running in a RAID configuration, are you? That could also have caused it.

Hope that's helpful.

Regards, Andrew

scherz0 · Feb 12, 2022

andrewlen said:
I would suggest you physically disconnect the D drive by opening the case and pulling both the SATA and power cables from it, with the machine disconnected from any power first, of course.

1. I don't need to physically disconnect the D drive, correct? I can merely disable or Spin Down the D drive with mouse clicks?

andrewlen said:
Note that I'm assuming D is a secondary physical HDD and not just a C SSD system drive partition. Providing that's the case, then I would turn the computer back on with the D drive's cables disconnected and if everything still boots and works fine, then you could just turn the machine off and disconnect from power again, plug its SATA and power cables back in, then boot the machine back up and format it in NTFS. Be sure you back up anything you've stored on D that you may want to keep before formatting, of course.

My drive C is a SSD. Drive D is a 5400 RPM HDD. I've devoted C:\ to programs and Windows files, and D:\ to personal documents and visual media. I never deliberately moved Windows programs to D:\.

andrewlen said:
BTW... You're not running in a RAID configuration, are you? That could also have caused it.

2. Does my screenshot of Disk Management below answer your question? I'm hoping you can clarify for me!

andrewlen · Feb 12, 2022

Hello,

scherz0 said:
1. I don't need to physically disconnect the D drive, correct? I can merely disable or Spin Down the D drive with mouse clicks?

You can try, but I prefer a physical approach. You have a basic and dynamic disk. A sure way to know what will happen is to physically disconnect the secondary disk and see if there are any issues with it missing. If not, then you can format it and problem solved. That's the approach that I would take. Given the additional information you've given, I suspect that you'll need to reconfigure your system so that everything is on the one disk, else you can never be sure what's part of the OS and what isn't on the D: drive.

scherz0 said:
My drive C is a SSD. Drive D is a 5400 RPM HDD. I've devoted C:\ to programs and Windows files, and D:\ to personal documents and visual media. I never deliberately moved Windows programs to D:\.

That would explain why you have system-related folders on your D drive. If you used the "Move" command to move the documents folder over from C to D it becomes a part of the Windows OS structure.

The second screenshot doesn't answer my questions, unfortunately. It only raises more.

I suggest you proceed as initially suggested, report back with the result and we can go from there. The entire configuration as shown is quite unusual.

Regards, Andrew

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Why do the same programs appear on both drives C and D?

scherz0

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andrewlen

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scherz0

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andrewlen

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