re-joining partitions..

[hsadan]

sorry for the vague title, but I'm not too sure what to put.

my friend just got a new hard disk, and so he wants his current hd with 2 partitions to be just 1 partition (he wants to have 2 partitions, not 3).

we dont have any fancy programs like partition magic, so I'll be going into dos and using fdisk to delete the current 2 partitions and create just one primary partition that takes up the whole hard disk.

2 questions:

is there anyway I can join them without having to delete and recreate, but without any premium programs (maybe say with xp disk management)?

if I were to backup both harddrives as a whole (eg create a disk image), would i be able to restore both onto the new partition and still have them work fine?

[prstudio]

http://www.partition-manager.com/home/personal/wizards.htm

this software isn't free but it talks about merging partitions, however windows xp writes specific boot information to the master partition - so make sure you back everything up before trying anything, manipulating partitions like this is serious business and like with any movement of the partition tables could leave the computer completely erased.

partition magic also lets you merge:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00006MJEN/103-3166927-3413430

[hsadan]

um yea I knew partion magic could do that, but I can't afford to buy a program that'll I will use only now and then.
that's why I mentioned that I "don't have any fancy programs like partition magic". :)

thanks for the reply anyway. I've already gotten the job done (backed up important files only, used winxp setup), so it's ok now.

[prstudio]

right i know, unfortunately in this case the only solution to your problem was to buy software, i have not yet heard of a free utility to do what you asked. i am glad that you were able to find a way to backup your data. :)

[lostinbeta]

Thanks for this info prstudio, I just recieved my copy of Ubuntu Linux in the mail (yeah I could have downloaded it, but the order was free, even shipping, so i figured why waste my own cds?) and I was wondering if I created a partition for dual booting if I could merge the two partitions back together if I decided I no longer wanted linux on the machine.

Partition Magic is actually a really good price (at amazon), so if need be I can always invest in that (it's a useful tool to have reguardless really)