Partition Question?

[jdchevyman]

I have a 80gb secondary drive that is partitioned in half NTFS and I just bought a new secondary drive 200gb. Is it possible to unpartition the 80gb drive and use it for the main boot drive. If so how should I do it or what would be the best thing to do? Thanks in advance.

 

[Blujacket]

You'll need a software such as PartitionMagic to merge the 2 partitions into one.

http://www.symantec.com/partitionmagic/

[PM is now owned by Symantec (Norton AntiVirus).]

Or you could use Partition Commander from

http://www.v-com.com/news/news_ar33.html.

 

[jdchevyman]

I have partition magic 8. So I just choose to merge the two partition? I also want to format it should I do that first and what should I use to do that? Thanks.

 

[JaniceWoman]

You mentioned "half NTFS" what is the other half? Are they both NTSF? How large is your Primary Partition? How much free space is left on your Primary?

 

[wolluf]

jdchevyman - is your operating system (2k/XP?) currently installed on the ntfs partition on the 80GB drive?

If the 2 partitions are different filestore types, you'll need to convert the second to ntfs first (PM can do this also) before merging them with PM.

Note: Merging partitions where one is the boot partition can be a risky business in terms of booting after the merge (you can lose the boot sector). You can create a boot floppy - copy ntldr, ntdetect.com & boot.ini from the root of the ntfs partition to newly formatted floppy. This will boot 2k/XP if the boot sector gets corrupted.

Also, if you're having a 200GB additional drive, why do you need to merge the partitions on the 80? (Assuming the ntfs partition is reasonable size)

 

[jdchevyman]

Both halves are NTFS 40gb each. I dont have to merge the 80gb I was just wondering if it could be done. The 80 is my secondary drive and I now want to format it and use it as the primary boot drive. What would you suggest I do? Should I just leave it partitioned and just format it? I am running WinXP pro. Thanks.

 

[wolluf]

If you're going to install XP on it fresh and you want one partition, you can do this during XP install (it has tools to remove existing partitions & create new ones, so you could just remove the 2 and create a new one for the install. I'm assuming you're backing up everythign you need from the drive before starting this.

 

[jdchevyman]

Yes thank you I'll try that.