Hard Drive Question(s)

[swampdonkey]

Hi all,

A buddy of mine has an old Pentium 2 400mhz PC. He has 64 megs of SDRAM and is running windows 98. My question is about his hard drive. I believe it is a 10 gig hard drive, but somehow it became separated into about 8 or 10 different drives. Each separate drive has a different amout of space allocated to it. HOW DO I COMPACT THESE DRIVES INTO THE ONE DRIVE THAT IT REALLY IS?

Any help would be appreciated.

~swampdonkey

[WhatsThisBoxFor?]

You can reformat, and repartitian, but you would lose all your data.

You could also use a program such as partitian magic ( http://www.powerquest.com/partitionmagic/ ) to merge them, which will do what you want.

[glc]

Sounds like maybe they are all FAT16, which has a 2gb partition limit. They need to be converted to FAT32 before you try to merge them.

[swampdonkey]

How do I convert them to FAT32 and how do I merge them?

[swampdonkey]

Oh, sorry, I missed the link in the first reply. But, is there software that I can download for free that will do the same as Partition Magic? Won't Windows be able to manage and merge them?

[glc]

Windows has a builtin fat16 to fat32 converter if it was installed, but it takes hours to do. Windows cannot merge partitions, you need a partition manager to do it nondestructively. The only free one I know of is "Ranish" but it's not user friendly and I don't think it can merge, just resize.

Honestly, the best way to do this is back up your data and wipe the drive and start fresh.

[swampdonkey]

So when I format the hard drive, how do I convert it to fat32? Will it ask me before the format? I will be installing Windows 98SE on the drive.

~swampdonkey

[glc]

You will use FDISK when you boot with a floppy or the 98 CD - choose "yes" to large drive support to enable FAT32. Delete all partitions then create a new primary DOS partition to use 100% of the drive.

http://www.pcmech.com/show/harddrive/137/

To delete partitions, you have to do it in a specific order - you have to delete logical drives in extended partitions first, then delete extended partitions, then the primary partitions.