Drive partitions/unpartitioning

[Arin 0]

I got into partitioning to easily seperate my harddrive and to make backing up/reformatting easy. But, I ended up making a partition that I no longer want.

 

Here is what I want to change:

 

On my backup 80 gig hardrive, I have 3 partitions.

The first is 10gigs, the second is 10gigs, and the third is 60gigs (smaller, but thats what they basically are). I want to unpartition the 2 ten gig hardrives and make them into one partition. I have nothing on the first 10 gig partition, but I have all my game installs on the second 10 gig partition.

 

How can I go about making these into one partition?

 

This is all in windows xp pro corp sp1a & all drives are NTFS.

[duhmez 0]

You said " I want to unpartition the 2 ten gig hardrives "

 

Is this a typo and you mean 2 10 gig partiitons?

 

If so I have another question. Are all 3 partitions primary partiitons, or are they logical drives in the unpartiitoned space.

 

If your disk is dynamic, then you can nuke the 2 ten gig partitions, and merely extend your 60 gig to be the full 80 gig. If it is not dynamic then you can make it dynamic for this operation. This sounds like what you want to do.

 

1) Right click the drive on the far left>convert to dynamic disk

1) Nuke both 10 gig partions

2) Right click the 60 gig parition>extend volume.

 

2K and XP are really nice with extending ntfs volumes on both IDE and scsi, as long as the disk is dynamic.

 

The downside to dynamic disks is you cant boot dos from it, or run win2k setup from dos.

 

If it really is differnet hard drives, then you must make them all dynamic, then right click them and "create spanned volume", but from what you said it sounds like 1 hard disk.

[Arin 0]

Ok, to clear up some confusion here is what I have....

First off, I just bought a 120 gig drive because my main 40 gig drive broke... so here is how I have everything layed out

 

120 gig drive

+20 gig - primary - system

+100 gig - logical - files and backup

 

80 gig drive

+10 gig - primary - was going to be system, bur currently blank

+10 gig - logical - games

+60 gig - logical - Storage of digital pictures and other files

 

I want my two 10 gig partitions on the 80 gig drive to be one 20 gig drive.

[duhmez 0]

Nuke the 2 10 gig parittions using disk management, and create a new 20 gig partition. (Move the data off them first using explorer.)

 

Thats it!

[duhmez 0]

Win2k/XP does not allow ntfs partition resizing unless the disk is dynamic.

 

This is an area where they remove funcitonalty to make people use the new methods.

 

As for nt 4 ntfs partition increasing, didn't that HAVE to be on scsi?

 

I know NT4 software raid requires scsi......

[Arin 0]

Good deal! I'll prolly do it tomorrow