Merging Boot and System partitions?

[Morlan]

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]

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

 

[Morlan]

Thanks Simmy.