need help with drive letter change please

[MGood777]

I have two physical hard drives (c: and d in a machine running WinXP only. I own both DriveImage 2002 and PartitionMagic 8.0. Both hard drives are small (4GB or less), and I want to combine them both into a larger 60GB drive.

My plan was to partition the large drive, then copy the two drives over to the larger one. However, then I want to remove the partition and use the large drive as a single logical drive.

Could somebody please give me some advice on how to best do the drive letter change from one logical drive to another. This is an important home office computer, so I can't be conducting experiments on it. I understand that XP has a "change drive letter" function, but I'm not sure whether I should be using that or PartitionMagic.

Please help! Thanks in advance...

Mike

[Tuf]

The easiest way would be to use Drive Image, I use Ghost but I believe is very similar. Ghost your C: drive to the 60GB drive that has been partitioned and formatted. Remove your original C: Drive and install the D:drive. Hopefully you just have data on this drive and you can simply copy it over. If you do have programs installed on the old D drive you will have to reinstall them.


This could still leave you with some oddball problems if you don't uninstall any programs that are on the D drive currently before you begin.


If this is really is an important computer, the best way will be to back up your data and do a clean install of everything. Ghosting one drive is no big deal bu ttrying to merge them while possible almost always leaves some quirky problems, that can be time consuming to figure out.


So if it's jusst data on the second drive I would say go for it. But if there are programs involved I would say don't merge them if you need the computer to be up and running perfect the first day.

Nothing beats a clean install when hardware configurations are being changed.