Why three (3) i386 Directories

This question may seem trite to those of you that have a great understanding of today's technology, but my only experience with computers was in the Air Force during the Nam war. Computers were housed in large buildings, too hot, too cold, too much humidity, too little humidity, too much input at one time would make them crash. Used IBM punch cards to input info. If I would have had access to today's technology back then, we'd have won that war. Anyway, I have an HP Pavilion 533w with preinstalled Windows Home Edition (needless to say I don't have the Windows install CD). I noticed I have three (3) i386 Directories. One directory is C:i386 (418,703 KB), another is C:\Windows\i386 (418,703 KB), the other is recovery drive D:i386 (1,574,296 KB). Need someone to explain the differences between the three. (asked HP but they weren't of much help, won't get into that right now). Also, why is C: drive formatted NTFS and D: drive FAT32. Any help will be greatly appreciated by this old dog trying to learn new tricks!??!

 

There are three directories due to the way HP installed it. Normally you wouldn't have any.

The third directory is on the recovery partition, used to restore your system back to factory software and OS. It is fat32 most likely because the HP imaging tool probably cant read NTFS. AFAIK, all recovery partitions are fat32.

The other two...one could guess.

C:\i386 is used to install Windows initially.
C:\windows\i386 is copied over so that Windows can look there for files when Windows File protection needs them. Without looking at the registry, it would be tough to be for sure.

Seems pretty inefficient, doesn't it? Thats preinstalled software for ya.