Partition Magic question

[Steve L]

My Sony Viao desktop 60GB HD comes formatted with two partitions: a C and a
D drive. If I want to merge my D drive and C drives with Partition Magic so
I only have one drive, do I run the risk that things will get screwed up?
Is there any advantage to doing that? If so, can I use a restore point to
restore it?

Steve

Please reply to group

 

[Guest]

From recollection, most of the manufacturers will provide a laptop with the
hard drive partitioned.

They use one partition for all the installation files and proprietary
information.

To loose this or 'merge' it into one large partition may prevent you from
being able to 'rebuild' the system in the event of a catastrophe.

It may be wiser to leave well alone. You do not get any advantage in having
one 'large' partition in place of two smaller ones, except maybe a few
megabytes of disk space.

In summary, to merge the partitions may result in an unusable Windows
environment and / or loss of restoration capability and no advantage in terms
of performance or operations on the PC. All loss and no gain!

 

[Steve L]

Thanks. I suspected this was the case. That is why I asked before doing it.

Steve

 

[Mike Hall]

There will be little gained by doing it, and you could lose it all.. the D
drive can be used to save data, install programs, whatever you want..

If it ain't broke, don't fix it..

 

[Peter Wilkins]

My Sony Viao desktop 60GB HD comes formatted with two partitions: a C and a
D drive. If I want to merge my D drive and C drives with Partition Magicso
I only have one drive, do I run the risk that things will get screwed up?
Is there any advantage to doing that? If so, can I use a restore pointto
restore it?

I am 99.9% certain that a system restore point will not help if PM
screws up the re-partitioning, and PM strongly recommends taking a
full system backup before meddling with partitions.

There are several potential problems with merging the partitions, but
it is feasible and can offer some advantages in simplicity. You may
even see a (very) slight increase in speed if the HDD heads do not
have to hunt between partitions quite so often.

First, you need a version of PM that works with your OS.
If you have XP, I suggest PM8 although 7 is SUPPOSED to work.

Secondly, if you do it and it works OK, your registry probably will be
screwed up with references to the D drive, and affected programs will
not run. Your CD or DVD will also change drive letter (probably from
E to D). To fix the registry, you will need to run DriveMapper, a PM
tool. Manually changing all the registry entries for this is possible
but NOT recommended if you have DriveMapper.

Just for info, I seem to be perennially splitting and combining
partitions on my HDD's as I change my ideas on how I want to manage my
data, and I've never had a problem with PM except once last week,
trying to re-partition an external HDD with one NTFS and one FAT32
partition - it did it, but with system errors and I had to redo it
using XP's Disk Management, then restore my backup. Remember that,
unlike PM, WinXP or DOS partitioning software won't retain any data on
the drive being partitioned - you will have to first back up the data
or lose it.

 

[Alex Nichol]

Thanks. I suspected this was the case. That is why I asked before doing it.

Sony Vaio divides the drive with the idea you are going to use D for
data and C for System and programs. Then if you have to reinstall using
their disks, one option is to reformat C and leave D alone. There is a
*great* deal to be said for this. Indeed I might (if PM was around)
shrink the C a bit and make D more important, having things like My
Documents moved to that