Mac Newb Question

[spooky mulder]

I just switched to mac like 7 months ago and i have noticed that there are 3 drives listed in disk utility.

one says 111.8 GB st9****************Media

one says Macintosh HD

one says Matshita CD-RW......... etc.

i figure that the matshita is my dvd/cd drive, but why two hard drive icons?
Is it safe to run disk utility on the one that says Macintosh HD, and the one that says 111.8 GB st9******* And is it also safe to run the "Erase Free Space" option on both of these? Why the two what is the dif?

thanks for any replies :apple:

[matt90]

The "Macintosh HD" is probably indented under the mystery drive. The mysterious one is the physical hard disk inside your computer. The "Macintosh HD" is the virtual disk (a partition) on the physical disk. If you partition your disk into multiple partitions, you will find several virtual disks (with the names you gave them) indented under the physical hard drive (with its model name).

[spooky mulder]

The "Macintosh HD" is probably indented under the mystery drive. The mysterious one is the physical hard disk inside your computer. The "Macintosh HD" is the virtual disk (a partition) on the physical disk. If you partition your disk into multiple partitions, you will find several virtual disks (with the names you gave them) indented under the physical hard drive (with its model name).

thanks for the reply, so if i erase free space on the actual drive , not the partition that I use, will there be any problems/crashes/ reinstalls? Thanks again for the clarification.

[MacinDoc]

thanks for the reply, so if i erase free space on the actual drive , not the partition that I use, will there be any problems/crashes/ reinstalls? Thanks again for the clarification.
Erasing free space shouldn't cause any problems, but you probably don't need to do it.

[spooky mulder]

Erasing free space shouldn't cause any problems, but you probably don't need to do it.

cool thanks a lot, just needed some clarification. Have a nice one