Combine Partitions

[George W. Barrowcliff]

Win XP Pro, Svc Pak 2

I have a 40 GB drive that I partitioned when I bought the machine into three
operating system primary partitions along with an extended DOS partiton.

I overlaid the boot manager some time ago with the XP boot sectors and the
system boots reliable into the XP partition with no problems.

The XP partition is 22 GB and I am down to about 32% free space and would
like to reclaim the other two 20 GB partitions before it becomes a problem..

Computer Management-Disk Management report is shown below:

The partition shown as H: is the IBM service partition and I have the page
file on the D: drive but will move that back to C: before starting.

Is it possible to do this with native tools for XP? I have Partition Magic
I would just like to pick up the E: and G: parttitions, reformat to HPFS and
combine them into a single large extended partition

I would appreciate any tips.

Thanks, GWB


E: Partition Basic Healthy (Active) 22.57 GB 22.57 GB
100%
H: Partition Basic Healthy 4.89 GB 4.89 GB
100%
FAT(D) Partition Basic FAT Healthy(Page File) 1.99 GB 504 MB
24%
FAT32 (G Partition Basic FAT32 Healthy (Active) 22.56 GB 21.65 GB
95%
IBM_PRELOAD (C Partition Basic NTFS Healthy(System) 22.51 GB 7.33 GB
32%

 

[Squire]

Partition Magic 8 will do this for you without losing any programs you
installed.

 

[Vanguard]

I have a 40 GB drive that I partitioned when I bought the machine into
three operating system primary partitions along with an extended DOS
partiton.

The XP partition is 22 GB and I am down to about 32% free space and
would like to reclaim the other two 20 GB partitions before it becomes
a problem..

E: Partition Basic Healthy (Active) 22.57 GB
22.57 GB 100%
H: Partition Basic Healthy 4.89 GB
4.89 GB 100%
FAT(D) Partition Basic FAT Healthy(Page File) 1.99 GB
504 MB 24%
FAT32 (G Partition Basic FAT32 Healthy (Active) 22.56 GB
21.65 GB 95%
IBM_PRELOAD (C Partition Basic NTFS Healthy(System) 22.51 GB
7.33 GB 32%

The information for Disk Management (for what you have shown) gives no
information about which are the primary partition and which are the
extended partitions, their order on the drive, and the order of logical
drives within extended partitions. Also, the file system is missing
from a couple of those that are listed so we don't know if they are file
systems that Partition Magic can understand (since Disk Management isn't
listing their file systems). Use the graphical view in Disk Management
to relay how the partitions are setup, or use Partition Magic. You can
also use the PartInfo tool included with Partition Magic and save it to
a file. The output is so long that wrapping would occur if you simply
pasted it in a post here. Attach it as a .txt file to your post. You
are posting through Microsoft's NNTP server and, I believe, their server
will accept posts with attachments although this is a non-binary group.

Without knowing which are the primary and extended partitions, and their
order, and the order of logical drives within any extended partitions,
there is no way anyone can tell you how to delete or move partitions so
you can get contiguous free space next to the partition that you want to
enlarge. Basically, save the data from the partitions that you will
delete to create free space, move the partitions around so the free
space gets moved next to the one that you want to resize, and then
resize that partition.

Also mention which are the system and boot partitions (they may be the
same) for Windows. C: is the normal default but I'm not sure if the
"pre-load" partition is the one from which you restore the OS and maybe
E: is where the OS is installed that you load.

 

[Squire]

Assuming you have PM installed on your boot partition,
Using the menu's at the top,
Delete all extra partitions, saving your 22 gb partition.
When you delete the extra partitions you will have a blank unallocated
space.
Now you can Resize your 22 gb partition.
Do not create or format the partition,
PM will take care of that as you resize.
Then
Create partitions as needed.
PM can also change from Fat32 to NTFS.