Merging two partitions into one.

[FireByyrd]

I have one physical hard drive. I have two partitions C and D. Is it possible for me to merge C and D together into one C partition?

Will any problems arise with doing so?

The reason why I am doing this is because my D partition with XP is running out of space.

[freakitchen]

You'd need a partition utility to do this, such as Norton Partition Magic, or Acronis Disc Director.

With any partition work, it's always advisable to back up your data, and create the rescue discs that both programs advise you to create.

FK

[D_Stark]

You could do it by reinstalling windows as well. But you would lose all data on your hard drive.

[FireByyrd]

Yes, but I don't want to lose any data..

[KilluminatiStyle]

Originally Posted by Freakitchen You'd need a partition utility to do this, such as Norton Partition Magic, or Acronis Disc Director. With any partition work, it's always advisable to back up your data, and create the rescue discs that both programs advise you to create. FK

BACKUP FOR SURE!!

Just recently I lost 5 years of photos and over 45GB of MP3's while trying to merge 2 partitions. I cried myself to sleep that night. Luckily I was able to recover almost all of the photos but for some reason the MP3's that were recovered were all corrupt.

I was using Partition Magic 8 I beleive.

[FireByyrd]

Wow.. >_< and I have many GBs of irreplaceable Chinese music too. Thank you for the warning, I will heed it and proceed accordingly.

[glc]

I would not recommend merging the 2 - just resize them, one at a time.

[D_Stark]

You could just move some files to your other patition. You could buy an extra hard drive and set it up as slave or an external usb drive.

[heymrdj]

I recently lost 3 years of anime collection. 45GB of anime (when your limited to 170MB of download a day). I lost school reports too. All when messing with the boot sector. That was painful.

[TwoRails]

What sizes are your partitions? There are some things you can do, as D_Stark refers to, that can give you more room. One is to put your emails and internet cache on the other drive. If you don't use hibernate, you can turn that off and save space roughly equal to your memory. You can even mover you Documents folder(s) to the other drive.

[FireByyrd]

:C partition has 218.GB
D: partition which has Windows on it, 14.6GB.

I should have made the D partition a little bigger, but I was curious if you could merge the two without any problems.. but I see there is, so I won't bother.

I don't think I can go about reinstalling XP because I have many programs attached to windows, if reinstalling many programs would cease to work.

Can I move all my C: files and stuff to a external harddrive... then bring the 218GBs from the external harddrive to the D parition enlarged with the 218GBs because I deleted the C partition? Is that possible?

[D_Stark]

You could put(If you have enough room)winXP on your C: drive and dual boot if that would help. That way you could still use your old WinXP instalation. Just another idea. I'd back up all my data anyway just to be on the safe side.

[TwoRails]

Originally Posted by FireByyrd :C partition has 218.GB D: partition which has Windows on it, 14.6GB. ...

Ya, you could move things around if you have time and patience, and something like Ghost, but 14GB is really plenty for the OS if you do some switching around. As mentioned above, one thing you can do is to put your emails and internet cache on the other drive. If you don't use hibernate, you can turn that off and save space roughly equal to your memory. You can even move your Documents folder(s) to the other drive if there are a lot of photos and the like in there. Also, make sure to install all programs on the larger drive; that saves a ton of room. If you have a lot of programs loaded now, you can even uninstall them and reinstall them to the larger drive. My OS drive is also small, but I do the above and it works great. Heck, I even have Window's "temp" directory on a different drive to save that small space.

HTH

[gary_hendricks]

Best way is to use Partition Magic and merge the 2 drives. Make absolutely sure nothing cuts the power off while you're doing it!

[glc]

No, you do NOT want to merge the partitions. You can use Partition Magic to RESIZE the C partition - just make it smaller and locate the resultant free space between C and D. Then you can RESIZE D to take up that free space, thereby making it larger. Merging is going to cause a problem with drive letters - do you want to make it C or D? Either way, something will wind up not working.

[KilluminatiStyle]

Originally Posted by glc No, you do NOT want to merge the partitions. You can use Partition Magic to RESIZE the C partition - just make it smaller and locate the resultant free space between C and D. Then you can RESIZE D to take up that free space, thereby making it larger. Merging is going to cause a problem with drive letters - do you want to make it C or D? Either way, something will wind up not working.

I take it you've had some bad experience with merging partitions? I've done it SEVERAL times before without any problems... the last time I did it when I lost my data I got some kind of error about cycilic redundancy. I'm thinking that the drive itself is either going or had alot of bad sectors on it. In any case... if you take extra steps... ie. scan disc(thorough), make backups if possible, etc... you should be fine with merging. Even if you don't take extra precautions you should still be fine although after what happend to me recently I would NEVER recommend it. The whole drive letter thing glc is talking about is a nuisance yes but it's easily fixed with a few changes and reboots.

[Mesaeus]

I've been using Partition Magic since version 3.0 or something and it's a very fine program. However I also once lost the contents of both partitions I was trying to merge. I usually use something like GetDataBack to get my data, but this time everything in both partitions was scrambled. That has been the only time I actually lost so much data and the only time PM malfunctioned for me. After a few hours of banging my head against the wall and wailing I remembered that against my usual negligence of making backups, I actually had copied that drive to another to test the other hard drive. So my story had a happy end, but I still second glc's suggestion to use resize instead of merge, it's far more safe. Oh and make a backup

[D_Stark]

Yes, make sure you back up everything. My data drive just crashed about a week ago and I had to use a third party software program to get my data back. I am in the process of backing up everything now. It's really time consuming, I should have done it as I did it. I used Restorer2000. I worked well.