Yeah, its annoying when they do things you don't ask for, aint it?

This should help: If you're using Windows, right click on My Computer, goto the Hardware tab and click Device Manager. Click on the '+' sign next to the portion that says 'Disk Drives'; if you see two seperate entries, then you have two seperate physical drives. If you only see one, then you have 1 hard drive running in two partitions.

Seeing as how you have a laptop, its probably the latter. If you want to remove the partition, goto Disk Management under Control Panel, reinstall Windows and use their formatter, or use something like Norton PartitionMagic to unpartition the drives.

Good luck.

What you have is a blessing in disguise.

It is a very good thing to have at least 2 partitions on a hard disk, the operating system on one, and your precious data on the other.

The thing that would be of concern to me, would be the relevent sizes of the partitions, and whether they suit your system or not.

You need to think of the long term, and start planning the future disk usage now, deciding which drive you are going to store what data on. It's really not complex, and for a little time invested in getting used to it, it will reap long term rewards.

EDIT :

I just remembered something..........  a friend of mine just bought a new acer, and I now remember it came pre-configured with a second small partition to store backup data for their system restore software. I bet that's all it is.

Ah yes, you are right about that. Why are they still putting sucky little drives in laptops? They must have made heaps of them and now they are surlpus and cheap prolly.

Greg, there are never the right amount of megabytes on a drive as you would be led to believe.......... it's because of the way hard disk manufacturers rate the drive size and one of the great mysteries of the universe, but, out of lack of interest and fatigue, I'm not going to explain the math right now. Suffice to say, you don't get what you pay for, you get "taxed" as in just about every other endeavour we do.    

It's pretty easy to manage a second partition and it should force you to quickly learn some file handling skills if you lack them. You'll be up to speed in no time and better off for it. Shame the hard disk is a tad on the small size though, If it has a DVD burner built in, make good use of it to store data you don't need on the hard disk permanently.

If your FS9 folder is as big as mine, you are going to need the whole second partition just for that!

If you want, just repartition the drive and set each partition to the size you want. Every windows install cd has a partition manager on it. If you do repartition, you may have to reinstall windows and everything.