Partition merging in windows 7 or other means question

[agnes]

Here is my question...

I had 3 partitions on a 500 gig WD drive:

100gb for XP - Now formatted and unallocated
100gb for Win 7 - Main active partition
300gb for stuff

Now, the XP partition is on the far left in storage manager.

Am I wrong in being under the impression this space can not be merged with the 'stuff' partition to total that to 400 gigs? Stuff is on the far right, so Win 7 partition is in the middle of the 2.

If it is possible, how do I go about it? I have tried through storage manager but had a no go, also booted into mini xp via hirens disk but no luck their either.

ags

ags

 

[Frozennova]

Ubuntu livecd and Gparted may be your best shot. AFAIK they have to be next to each other however I cant remember if Gparted sorts all this for you

Might be a long winded way but if you was to merge the two 100gb partitions then resize it back to 100gb that should leave the free space mid drive allowing the unallocated space and storage to be merged

 

[JonJ678]

Sure, you can do this. Can do almost anything with partitions really, just takes a while. In linux at least, I know little about windows.

Actually simpler than I thought, the XP partition is dead and gone? I'll assume you don't want to keep xp, then write a more detailed guide if you wish to preserve it.

Boot a gparted livecd, or an ubuntu cd which you then run gparted from. No difference.

Right click, unmount the stuff and vista partitions (they're probably not mounted, so don't be surprised if it tells you this). Then,

1/ Choose to move the vista partition, should be intuitive. Right click on vista in the main list, choose resize/move, then either drag the graphic to the left or type zero in the "space before" box and click on the box in the middle.

2/ Choose to resize the stuff partition to fill the remaining space. Or you can move it to the left, and add a resize as a second operation. Won't make much difference.

3/ Click the do, implement, whatever the button at the bottom is called. It'll warn you not to reboot while it's working.

4/ Go to sleep.

It will take a long time to move the partitions. Expanding to the right is quick, expanding to the left quite slow. As in a fair few hours, longest I've known it take was 18 hours on a c2d laptop. People complain gparted is slow, to which the normal response is "would you rather it was slow and reliable, or fast and cocks up your data half the time?". This will only screw up your data if your ram is faulty or if you stop it partway through because you think it's taking too long (been there )

It's recommended to back up data first. I stopped bothering ages ago, but up to you. It's a really bad idea to stop it partway through, as recovering the partitions through testdisk can be quite tricky.


(a brief summary of swapping partitions around, as would be needed if moving xp to the other side of vista. Make a new partition exactly the same size as XP, on the right hand side of vista. Use dd to overwrite the new partition with the old one. Mount both. Run rsync as a paranoia check in case something was corrupted on route. Nuke the old one. Move partitions around using gparted. )