Hard Disk Drive

[Chris D]

When I bought my computer it came with a 120GB hard disk drive, however it was partitioned into three sperate drives. So basically what would have been one C:\ drive is now a C:\, D:\ and an E:\ Drive.

Now I know, that with the right tools, it's pretty easy to partition a disk drive, but does anyone know if it's possible to unpartition a disk drive safely? I don't want to lose any data and I don't want any risk of breaking the disk drive, is it possible to just make it one drive again?

 

[Northwood83]

What operating system are you running? As long as you dont have anything on the partition you wont lose anything. If you have windows xp do the following.

1.Click START
2.Click Run
3.Type diskmgmt.msc and hit enter

 

[Chris D]

Ok so it comes up with a table of all the drives I have.

Disk 0 is the harddrive and it has a primary partition (C:\ which I want to keep and make bigger), then it has two logical drives which are D:\ (which I want to get rid of and merge with C:\) and E:\ which I'm going to keep as it is only 10GB and it stores windows back up data and system recovery files on it.

I'm full formatting drive D:\ to make sure it's clean, after it's finished formatting do I just click on "Delete logical drive..." to merge it back with C:\?

 

[Northwood83]

Sorry, You cant merge unallocated space with another partition. You will have to format, and once your in the windows XP setup delete both D, and C drive partitions thus making them unallocated space then create a new drive (C) and use both C and D's unallocated space.

 

[Chris D]

So what I want to do is impossible?

Ok what about merging the two logical drives I have - do they both have to be formatted before I do that, and how would I go about doing it?

 

[Xtasy0]

Originally posted by Chris_D
So what I want to do is impossible?

Ok what about merging the two logical drives I have - do they both have to be formatted before I do that, and how would I go about doing it?

it's not impossible, you just cant do it with tools in windows. if you got a program like powerquest partition magic it would let you delete D: and then resize C: to take up all the empty space left by D: of course when you do this there is a chance for data loss, i've seen it happen, but if you're just making the partition larger then it should work fine.

 

[Chris D]

I'll have a look. My mother's boyfriend used to have it but it might be rather old. I'll check it out. Thanks to both of you.

What would you say is the chance of data loss?

 

[supangr]

Originally posted by Chris_D
I'll have a look. My mother's boyfriend used to have it but it might be rather old. I'll check it out. Thanks to both of you.

What would you say is the chance of data loss?

Well I used to do partition resizing fairly often, until one day I did it and the drive became unrecognizable..to anything, meaning no format possible, nice 40GB paper weight, thanks to partition magic. Need I mention I no longer repartition ever?