Computer help forum: How to Unpartition C and D Drive?

http://www.google.com/search?&q=PARTITION+MAGIC

The hint is in the above link. It does that.

Bob

If you can't reformat a drive, then your issue is... elsewhere.

Partition Magic has never been known to make a drive unformatable. You should seek a drive maker's test software (you didn't tell the make/model drive!) so the drive's fitness can be tested.

Some have an issue and assign the blame, but as your case goes, you gave me the exact reason why I would not blame Partition Magic.

Think about it.

Bob

If jsmooy had ever had the possibility of backing up his information I think he wouldn't ask this question.

Above all the issues that PM could have, if i'm asking help for a problem and somebody like Bob give a website as an answer I'd preffer him not to be helping people arround. Because that is not only a lazy answer, it had lots of possibilities for a misstake.

If you are really going to help just do it. Don't go arround giving lazy hints.
"Bob's answer" VS. "I know there's a way but I'm not teeling you" at the end is the same. I RATHER LOOK FOR HELP IN A SERCH ENGINE LIKE THIS http://search.yahoo.com/search?fr=fp-pull-web-t&p=PARTITION+SOFTWARE

Amen Bob. Some folks just don't want to learn anything on their own.

i don't know how you killed your partitions with pm, but i don't think you had to get a new one--you mentioned "reformatting" instead of "repartitioning"-- if your partitions are screwed up, you can't reformat cause you don't even have partitions to format in the first place!

simplest suggestion is to slave the hdd to another pc run a few scans of it to ensure it is virus and bug free and take off everything that is wanted do a search for *dbx files outlook express mail copy them as is from their directory usually at c drive/docs and settings,user,local settings/application data/identites/. then put it back as its master and using the windows xp cd boot from bios to cd and run setup you are given the choice to delete the partition/s
hope that helps regards M

did you ever get an answer to this question, and if so could you please forward the "how to" to me?
Thanks,
marinalutz@mindspring.com

I made a very large mistake that is eating at my brain I only wanted to partition 20 gigs of my drive for feisty fawn the newer unbuntu well its not exactly newer but I like it anyway thats not the point the reason I made the mistake is because in on vista and I cant run command lines properly yet I double partitioned so I have my unbuntu drive as well as 2 windows drive and I can not figure how to combine the 2 windows drive the major problem is my back up somehow managed to get a huge scratch looks like I should have backed up my back up once again not the point the point is I wished I would have stayed with xp -.- anyone got an idea how to fix this i'm not in to big of hurry I alreay redirected all info to the proper drives if you can drop some info to me at my email emogirlsmakegoodpets@yahoo.com

So, yes he could and like Bob said PartitionMagic 8.0 will do the job. I owned a copy of PartitionMagic 3, 5, 6, 7 then 8 (right before it merged to Symantec) and I was very pleased with the software.

jsmooy,

However if this is a one time job, I would suggest you to get the freeware called Partition Manager at http://www.ranish.com/part/

A words of caution, backup all your sensitive data prior to merge these two partition together.

Regards,

well my friend im not blind ive used it and higly recomend it you have a problem with your system not pm
dont go ofending the people here that can help you

wise man says dont crap where you sleep

Yikes! I was on the MS XP forum and saw the same arguments regarding SP2, that you folks are making for PM.
1. Proposing that software that works for ME must also work for YOU is nonsense. Your computer and my computer are as different as a Great Dane and Beagle.
2. We should not be so quick to preach "You should know better". Why do you think he came to a forum to get advice?
3. Anytime ANYONE gives you advice on modifications to the file system, put your seatbelt on. All sorts of variations that the advisor cannot foresee, may affect your results:
- file system security settings and encyptions.
- drivers
- file system quota settings
- BIOS (Yep... Some BIOS pkgs do not play nice with 3rd party file system modifications or "system accelerators").
- and stuff I can't think of.
Nothing I said here implies that PM is not a wonderful software package... I am just trying to keep a sense of reality regarding its use.

The real issue first is to determine if you really have TWO PARTITIONS on ONE DRIVE or TWO physical DRIVES with ONE PARTITION each.

IF you have two separate physical drives, you won't be able to merge them onto one partition or change the size of the partitions beyond the actual max size of the individual drive. - unless you have an O/S, etc to support either software or hardware RAID (and that's a whole 'nother ballgame).

If you have one drive with two partitions, you really DON'T want to unpartition the two drives. The operation system and programs wouldn't know where to find some things, expectioning them to be on D: unless you reinstall the OS and applications after you did this. And to do so would likely require you to FDISK and format the drive which means you would lose everything and have to reinstall the OS and all programs/data.

Whatever you decide to do, make sure you do a backup first so that you can recover. And read the directions and understand them completely before you install and run any of the programs that allow you to resize the partitions.

The suggestion to use Partition Magic or similar programs will allow you to RESIZE the existing partitions so you that you can make C: larger (and therefore D; would be smaller). Then you won't have to transfer data from one to the other.

Other possibilities:
1. Software that would allow you to compress data that is not used often to free up space. Or use compression on the drive to give the effect of a larger drive than you actually have.
2. Redirect your "My Documents" to drive D: and any others that can be.
3. Often when you install software you are asked where you want to install it, and you can tell it to put it in a directory on the D: drive. Some space will still be required on the C: drive, but usually much less.

We're looking on HOW to un-partition two partitions of a drive, not how to work AROUND it.

PartitionMagic has "DriveMapper" (for WIN9X) and "Change Drive Letter" (for WINNT/XP) option to cope with that problem.

Regards,

This is urban legend.

Take that statement to the Virus and Security Forum and see how the moderators answer.

As to sector sizes, I think you need to re-research that because... sector sizes for almost all PCs are 512 bytes. HOWEVER, CLUSTER sizes are an entirely other matter. Fat16, Fat32, NTFS all do this differently and I have this 160GB drive in one partition and the cluster size is... 4096 bytes.

CHKDSK output is:
160079660 KB total disk space.
101238848 KB in 78800 files.
22552 KB in 3972 indexes.
0 KB in bad sectors.
194292 KB in use by the system.
65536 KB occupied by the log file.
58623968 KB available on disk.

4096 bytes in each allocation unit.
40019915 total allocation units on disk.
14655992 allocation units available on disk.

Take some time to research these issues in depth.

Bob