Hard Drive partitions

[DougLD]

Hi all
The hard drive in my computer is partitioned into 3 drives I believe that you can remove the partitions and return it back to a single drive can anyone help me with this.
Regards
Doug

[Blknight.aus]

you certainly can, you can do it the hard way and loose all of your data with fdisk.

or download a good partition manager, pheonix partition manager, nortons disk doctor or partition magic are the 3 main suspects I use.

However... BACK UP THE CRITICAL DATA first and make sure you have you OS installation disk and numbers on hand prior to starting. Make sure all of these disks are in servicable condition... I got back from trying to do a reinstall on one last night and the winxp disk looked like it had been used to practice tap dancing on... sure the machines got its new hard drive in it but now its waiting for nuff nuff to buy a new OS...

[shorty943]

Another way, is a program called FIPS. (first interactive partition splitter) Can expand or shrink Windows partitions on the fly. Used it to halve the size of my Windows partition on my laptop, then made a Linux partition behind Windows. Runs from inside Windows, just don't play with the active partition, the C drive in Windows.
And above all, do like Dave says, and back up all vital data before playing that deep in the system. Also, make sure that backup actually works. Edit a few chosen, lesser important files in a way you can rectify easily. Then restore from the backup you made BEFORE editing. You would be amazed at the number of dud backup's come in for rescue, in my friends shop.

Good luck

Shorty.