Questions on merging two hard drive partitions?
 

Can anoyne give any advice on how to merge hard drive partions together? There is a Compaq Presario that has two hard drives but it operates on the second drive. The two hard drives aren't so much separate drives as it is one drive split into two. Before I fixed up the computer, there use to be two XP Home Editon Operating Systems and I got rid of one as the other didn't really do anything. Also, the Compaq is horribly slow in regards to internet browsing but it is due to me having low memory to support the programs. With that said, how can I merge two partitions into one big hard drive?

If Windows is installed on the second partition, then I don't know what you can do other than formatting the entire drive with one partition and reinstalling Windows. There may be a program that will expand a partition "backwards," but I don't know any such program personally.

I hope there's a better solution for you, but otherwise I'll echo what monster said. I recently tried to join two partitions into one, but couldn't do it. I formatted one partition, and even though Mac OS X is supposedly able to expand a partition, I couldn't do it. I ended up having to reformat the entire drive as one single partition.

My guess would be that if this is possible at all, it probably requires some specialized software.

I don't want to have to do that but I need to find a way to merge the drives or buy more memory.

As far as partition manipulation is concerned, I've been using Acronis Disk Director for some time due to its ease of use, but its drawback is the pricetag. However, I think there's several more that can do the same functions as their commercial equivalents:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...oning_software

Well, if possible and with an external backup drive, best be backing up all the documents first before rearranging the partitions, reformatting, and then reinstalling a fresh copy of XP.

Having two partitions has little to do with a slow internet browsing. It may be your connection that is slow. But if you do need more memory, then merging the two partitions won't really give you more memory. Well, I guess, in a way, it would by allowing for a larger pagefile. But you'd still be better off with having more ram.

So I suggest that, if you don't want to reinstall Windows and your only issue is a slow internet browsing experience, then just leave the partitioning the way it is. Either fix your connection problem or buy more ram, if lack of memory is indeed the problem.

Of course, if you do find a way to merge the two partitions without reinstalling Windows, then you can do that as well.

*re-reading first post*

Say, what's the specs on that Compaq? 1gb of memory is, I think at least for me, the current minimum amount for most browsers (especially Chrome and Mozilla) and that gives them breathing space, as 512mb of memory isn't going to cut it anymore.

consider trying EASEUS Partition manager, it supports resizing partitions, making partitions, formatting partitions.

now heres the trick, clean and turn that other partition into an unallocated space, resize the main partition to eat up that unallocated, now its a whole partition.

do note: it does not work on two separate drives, you'll need a RAID for that.

about your slow speed issue: you could pump up the virtual ram via adjusting it on the systems settings, this virtual ram is a type of ram that uses harddisk space, although its slower than the real ram it still does help.

I used to use something called Partition Commander...but haven't had to do such a thing in a few years so I don't know what the current state of the art is.

http://www.avanquest.com/USA/softwar...nder-11-126553

Two questions comes to mind, notwithstanding monster's point about browsing speed being unrelated: first, why do you need to merge the disks, and secondly how much space do you have left on each? Assuming for a moment the answer to the second doesn't explain the first, you can move your files from one disk to the other using windows natively, and then boot from a GParted Live CD to remove the now empty partition and grow/relocate the remaining one.

Well, Guernsey did say that his/her computer "operates on the second" partition, which I took to mean that Windows is installed on the second partition.