I built my own computer a month or two ago. When i installed everything I partitioned the hard drive almost in half.
I want to undo this so that I have one large partition.
The problem is, one partition is the system partition and the other is the boot partition so I cannot simply format or delete either.
How would I go about doing this without buying a new hard drive? Thanks.
I would try using a program like Partition Magic to edit the partitions like that, but I think you'd have to just reformat and repartition them to get them right, and I can't guarentee you'd be able to salvage your data.
I don't know too much about partitions, but give Partition Magic (or simular) a try becuase that might be able to repartition without deleting data.
PartitionMagic's probably your best solution.
From what I can tell, PartitionMagic seems to use the same funky file re-arrangement process that disk defragmentors like SpeedDisk do. Basically, it moves the files that are physically stored on your hard drive around so that they're contiguous (next to each other without any "holes" in between the various clusters). After it moves the files to the "front" of the hard drive, this frees up the "back" so that PartitionMagic can physically mess with it, as though you "just formatted", except with the operating system and all your files intact.
In layman's terms, it basically pushes all the junk that's cluttered around your hard drive (from all your file moving/deleting/saving) so that it's in one neat little stack on the side. Now that it's neatly cleaned up in the corner, it can now mess with the room arrangements how it pleases, allowing you to create your new partitions without messing with that pile of junk that's in the corner.
I know PartitionMagic also lets you "undo" this change so you have one giant partition available. For this one, think of what happened to your room after you did all that re-arrangement. It's now in multiple "parts". To get the parts back together, I imagine it tries to push the crap off to a side it's not working on so that it can "make room" for the crap that it's gonna sweep back into the area it's working on.
If anyone knows how it *really* works, please correct me.
<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: BahnKnakyu on 2005-12-21 17:07 ]</font>
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o_o The only way I can think of it doing it would be to move all the files to be contiguous then shove them all onto sectors as close together that is possible. Once it's done that, format the rest of the drive. Following that, move the files off those sectors to newly formatted sectors, then format the sectors the files were temporarily stored on. Sticking them all to one Partition.
But.. I don't really see how that'd work at all in reality.. It seems a bit.. weird and untrustworthy.
Might be actually possible and done that way, dunno, you'd have to try?
Best solution is always a friend's comp. Shove the stuff you want on to theirs, totally reformat your drive to one partition, install your OS, copy the files back, and away ya go.
Also it kinda sounds like you're not caring for keeping the files.. in that case you can so "simply" format. It's called a bootable Win CD + DOS.
Walkthroughness
Hope ya get the method that you're want to work for you. Though you may have already, meh.
Yeah, I agree. It does seem kinda iffy. I can imagine Bad Things Can Happen if the computer *ever* crashed in the middle of that, but the way you're describing it was what I was talking about. Kinda do a piece-by-piece formatting of the drive to turn it into one contiguous lump of... junk.
Dunno, I would also just back stuff up to DVDs and/or find a way to shove your crap off your computer as Zolpner said. Network a couple of computers if you have to - it's most surefire.
Remember, you only need to back up information and data - programs can always be reinstalled and/or redownloaded.
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