Recombining Partitions

[Steve]

I currently have a dual-boot system (Win98 & Win2k), I
want to eliminate the Win98 OS and re-combine the
partitions. Can I safely do this? I was thinking that I
could use Partition Magic V8 to safely recombine after
deleting Win98 through Win2k. Any thoughts?

 

[R. C. White]

Hi, Steve.

Eliminating Win98 is easy enough (just delete the Win98 boot folder and edit
C:\boot.ini).

Combining partitions is not as easy. Partition Magic and a few competing
products can do it, but the only way MS provides is to backup, repartition,
reformat, restore.

WinXP includes DiskPart.exe (which is NOT the same as the DiskPart command
in the Recovery Console), which has the /extend switch to "grow" a partition
by adding contiguous unallocated space following that partition. With this,
you MIGHT be able to backup D: (to C:?), delete D:, then extend C: to
include the unallocated space that used to be D:. But this is subject to
several "gotchas", at least one of which would probably keep it from helping
in your project: won't work on FAT32; won't work on the system partition or
boot volume; etc. And I don't recall if DiskPart was in Win2K.

I'm afraid you probably are back to PM or backup... :{

RC

 

[dotnet]

RC,
How do I add unalloocated space that has been added to a RAID5 to the
c: partition?
Doug