hard drive

[spoddynerd]

My pc has a 256 GB hard drive partitioned into two 128GB NTFS partitions which the BIOS, Windows XP boot disk and Partition Magic/ fdisk all seem to think are primary partitions on two separate disks (1 and 2). None of these can delete or merge either of the two partitions because they don't recognise them as being contiguous storage on the same disk.

Booting from the XP disc doesn't help for the above reason.

I arrived in this state by partitioning with PartitionMagic, then reinstalling XP without first merging the partitions.

What can I do?

 

[jimp56]

perhaps try converting the second partition to an extended partition, as opposed to primary?

 

[wolluf]

r u sure its one drive? if the bios is saying there are 2 drives.. (have you looked inside the case/did you build or buy this machine?). PM can't affect what the bios sees.

 

[spoddynerd]

That doesn't help because it just becomes an exended partition of 'disk2', and still cannot be merged with anything on disk1.

 

[spoddynerd]

I did buy the pc (from Tiny) and it came with one hard drive which I partitioned. I haven't looked inside the case, but I haven't purchased any additional hard drives.

 

[wolluf]

What appears in disk management (run diskmgmt.msc)?

 

[spoddynerd]

disk management shows two disks, each with a primary partition: C:\ on disk1 and D:\ on disk2.

 

[wolluf]

Open the case - you almost certainly have 2 drives (I've never seen or heard of what you're describing where there was only a single drive).

 

[spoddynerd]

You are indeed correct.