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Mystery acer D drive

Last response: in Storage

On my Acer 5315 laptop (Vista) I'm wanting to create a separate partition on the hard disk where I plan to install a separate OS for a dual-boot situation on the machine. I notice there is an Acer configured D drive partition already with quite a chunk of stuff on there taking up space. I took some snips here what this D drive partition reveals when I go to explore it:

The stuff on there, and the D drive partition itself, is stuff I never (intentionally) put there; it just is there due to Acer's setup. I am rather confused, after doing considerable googling about it, just whether I actually want/need the stuff there on the D drive or not. I already keep a full system cloned backup of the entire drive of the machine on an external HDD, and regularly copy/save my most current data files to another external drive. If the stuff currently on the D drive is just for Acer system restoration processes it seems unnecessary to me, and a waste of space. I'd really like to just get rid of the stuff on that D partition completely, to free up disk space and for my own partitioning scheme with the dual boot. However, I am reluctant go do so as I don't have an understanding as to why this stuff is there in the first place and what could happen if I just delete it if I don't want it. Any comments/advice appreciated.

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anonymous1 said:
It's a Vista backup.

So are all the folders there in the D drive for a Vista backup? Or just the "system volume information" folder, (which gives the access denied message)? What about the first partition shown here, the EISA partition, also on the disk? It too is an Acer install, apparently there for the purpose of of being available to restore the system back to its factory default configuration. Does it retrieve its backed up copy of Vista, when activated to run, from one or more of the folders there on the D drive? And what's up with it's relatively large size? Do I need it, or can't I just delete it too?

Like I said, I make my own full system and data backups to an external drive, so if I think I'd rather free up the hard disk space on the machine for other uses, is there going to be any harm in just getting rid of that D partition and the data contained in it, and maybe as well that EISA partition?

Anyway, just an update here. I went ahead and deleted the D partition and everything in it, and utilized the freed up disk space for a dual boot installation of a linux distro and in addition then recreating the D partition for that use. All turned out fine. For now I left intact the Acer installed "EISA" partition called "PQ Service", as cannot seem to obtain a definitive confirmation or any such acknowledgement from here one way or the other of the possibility of any potential negative effects of doing so.