Merging Boot and System partitions?

Morlan · 24 Feb 2006 at 15:58

Here's the situation. For some reason, my laptop drive was partitioned into two by the previous owner. It has a C: drive and an E: drive. The E: drive contains Windows XP, programs and personal files. The C: is empty apart from the system files, eg ntldr, ntdetect.com. This is causing confusion as some files are being saved to C: and I have to keep manually moving them all to E:

I want to merge the two partitions and just have C: as the only drive. Is this possible? I can't format and reinstall because I have important programs that can't be reinstalled.

ps. I have Partition Magic if that helps.

Morlan · 24 Feb 2006 at 16:02

Just a thought. If it's too messy to merge them, could I resize the C: partition to almost nothing, hide it, and then rename the drive letter on the E: partition to C:? Partition Magic seems to have tools to do this but I'm not sure if renaming the Windows XP drive will cause problems.

Many thanks

Simmy · 24 Feb 2006 at 17:54

Changing the drive letter of a system drive will probably cause every program to stop working

I also wouldn't attempt this with partition magic if you've got important files and documents on there, as it has more of a habit than most programs for screwing things up in my experience.

If it were me, I wouldn't risk it if I couldn't re-install the programs.

If you do try anything, make a back up of both partitions before hand so you can go back to the way it was.

Morlan · 24 Feb 2006 at 18:14

Thanks Simmy.

Jeff Crawly · 24 Feb 2006 at 23:49

Morlan said:
Just a thought. If it's too messy to merge them, could I resize the C: partition to almost nothing, hide it, and then rename the drive letter on the E: partition to C:? Partition Magic seems to have tools to do this but I'm not sure if renaming the Windows XP drive will cause problems.

Many thanks

If you do that the system will no longer boot!