Merging partitions on a hard drive

Mitth`raw`nuruodo · Post by **Mitth`raw`nuruodo** » 2005-01-23 02:40am

I have a 200 GB hard drive (Western Digital) which I bought a few months ago. I originally divided it into two partitions, with the intention to use one for something or other-- I don't even remember what. I ended up not using it, and this 40 GB partition is sitting there, empty (or mostly empty, it's 3% filled with the random information windows sticks on there-- pagefile and such). The 160 GB partiton, on the other hand, is full of data, and lots of it. I'd like to recombine these partitions, without losing the data on the larger one. Both partitions are NTFS.

Is this possible? If so, is it free? As a poor high school student, cost is a consideration. The unnecessary partition is an annoyance, but not worth shelling out money over.

(In case it matters at all, the windows device manager reports the hard drive as "WDC WD20 00JD-00FYB0 SCSI Disk Device")

Howedar · Post by **Howedar** » 2005-01-23 02:44am

I don't think it's possible to modify partitions without a complete reformat.

White Haven · Post by **White Haven** » 2005-01-23 02:46am

While there are programs taht can do that in THEORY (Partition Magic comes to mind), they're not 100% reliable, and a screwup means that you can kiss your data goodbye. Not worth the risk.

Mitth`raw`nuruodo · Post by **Mitth`raw`nuruodo** » 2005-01-23 02:50am

Alright; thanks.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2005-01-23 03:04am

You can take out the pagefile (in the system control panel) to ensure there's nothing on it. Then you can nuke the partition via Computer Management in Administrative Tools.

After that go hunt up some boot CDs that have ntfsresize on it so you can resize your master partition. It should work, though chkdsk might have to do a scan or two after you're done.

Mitth`raw`nuruodo · Post by **Mitth`raw`nuruodo** » 2005-01-23 03:12am

Thanks phongn.

I forgot to add, this partition is not my master hard drive. I have another 40 GB hard drive for the O/S.

EDIT: A picture is worth a thousand words, and I haven't used my photobucket account in awhile:

EDIT2: My google-fu is weak, and I'm tired. Does anyone happen to know of any boot disks containing ntfsresize offhand? Thanks in advance.

Terr Fangbite · Post by **Terr Fangbite** » 2005-01-23 01:34pm

Recently (yesterday infact) I did something akin to that. I originally had a 80 gig hd divided into two 40 gig partitions (one for windows one for linux). I bought another 80 gig hd and destroyed the original linux partitian then used the utility on the mandrake 10.1 OE disk to increase the windows partitian to the entire disk. No ill effects so far (resized my windows partitian about 5 times thus far).

Mitth`raw`nuruodo · Post by **Mitth`raw`nuruodo** » 2005-01-23 02:20pm

Terr Fangbite wrote:Recently (yesterday infact) I did something akin to that. I originally had a 80 gig hd divided into two 40 gig partitions (one for windows one for linux). I bought another 80 gig hd and destroyed the original linux partitian then used the utility on the mandrake 10.1 OE disk to increase the windows partitian to the entire disk. No ill effects so far (resized my windows partitian about 5 times thus far).

Hm. Well, I have some Mandrake 9 disks lying around; I just tried to use 'em to do that same thing. It refused to work, and I ended up just installing linux on a small part of the previously deleted space.

However, it's easily deleted, and I still want to increase my NTFS partition to encompass the entire disk.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2005-01-23 02:35pm

You can use the System Rescue CD and then use QTPartEd to do easy manipulation of partitions. Just be careful, though, Bad Shit can happen.