Hard Drive Partition Question

[CatahoulaHound]

Sorry if this is a dumb question, I just don’t have any experience in this area. I have a hard drive with 4 partitions, (C D E F). Partition C is near full while F is near empty. If I just delete partition F, will the space be “picked up” by partition C? I believe that Partition Magic was used to set up the drive, if that matters. It’s on an XP box. Thanks for any help.
Pat

 

[Frank4d]

Deleting F will make more space available for C, but you will need Partition Magic to increase it's size.

 

[Freestone]

Always backup your data to another drive or device before using Partition Magic or any other similar tool, no matter how trivial the change may seem. Too many people have come to these forums with tales of woe when something hiccupped during partition manipulation, and nearly all have gone away with no solution to their lost data.

And in your case, CatahoulaHound, doing what you propose, add the space now allocated to F: drive to C: drive, will affect ALL partitions on your drive. The free space created by deleting the F: drive partition will have to be migrated downwards to fit between the current existing C: and D: partitions so that it then can be concatenated to C: drive. This means data on E: will have to be moved upwards, followed by D:, then finally C: partitioned altered to include the now available space.

As you can see, all of your partitions are affected, and a heck of a lot of bytes and bits will be moved. The potential of losing data is greatly increased here.

 

[CatahoulaHound]

Thanks for the quick replies. I will backup and attempt the delete today.