Need to get rid of partition, make one big drive

I had a dual boot (xp-Linux,). I was running out of space on my xp partition, so I did a repair, "fixmbr" and got rid of the Linux boot loader.

I went in to Disc manger, and got rid of the Linux file system. With Linux gone, I still have the same problem of not having enough disc space. I have 26+GB and a 13GB partition. I want to make the drive, all one C: Drive.

Is there a way to do this in XP?

Thank you,

Chris.

 

I recently used Partition Magic from http://www.partitionwizard.com/. Its FREE to home users and itworked on both XP and a Win 7 machine.

 

Doesn't work. It says, "...1. In the Disk Management window, right-click the partition or logical drive that you want to delete, and then click Delete Partition or Delete Logical Drive."
All I get when I right click is, "New Partition ", "Properties," and "Help."

Chris.

 

Thank you for the replies.

I tried to do it from a live CD, but could not get qtparted to work either.

That's a good idea. I can use the small partition to put "my pictures" and put another 1.5GB and put my swap on that.

I see MS overlooked making it easy to change the folder to another place from the start menu. I'll get tweak ui and do it with that.

I'll let you know how it goes.

Chris.

 

Wow!!!, out of all the sites that say the only way to do it is a registry hack, or tweakui, I found this;

"Open a My Computer window and navigate to the location where you'd like My Music (or My Pictures) to reside. Then, open the My Documents folder in a different window. Drag the My Music (or My Pictures) folder to the other window, and Windows XP will update all of the references to that folder to the new location, including the Start menu. "

 

I see it will, "Copy ", that means everything will still be in C:doc...My Pics..., just a copy of them will be in my G: drive. I want to take it from C: and move it to G:.

Now what?

P.S. It didn't let me move Documents and Settings (I wanted to take the whole tree from the beginning).

Chris.

 

You must use the right side button on your mouse to drag and get the "Move" option.

BTW, You'll not be able to move the entire tree of Documents And Settings. There are active system files in there that defy you.

 

I just did,

1) Open My Computer.
2) Right click on My Documents present and from the sub-menu select Cut
3) Navigate to the location where you want to save the folder, right click and select Paste.

Looks like it worked good.

Thank you,
Chris.

 

If you find it doesn't suit you, try using the MS Method.

I think the advantage of using their way is that other MS programs will automatically find the new location.

More info here

 

The MS Method did not work. Chris.

 

As a footnote to this thread can I ask if there is any advantage in having one huge drive or two or three smaller ones?

 

One thing is two or three smaller ones is faster than one big one. Chris.

 

Thanks Chris. I understand now. I have 232GB on my C drive of which I have used up about a third. The big stuff I've got apart from Office is games (call of duty etc).
Do you think I would get better performance if I were to partition my c drive?
I don't want to sound dumb (its as well you cant see me) but on my recently bought custom made desktop on my computer under Devices with Removable Storage I have (apart from the cd rom) 5 listed drives with nothing in them. What can I do with them?; and if I want to partition my existing c drive would I need to buy a new hard drive to fill one of those other drives (does that make sense?)

 

In reality, the large drives are already split into multiple physical disks inside their enclosures. That makes it less important to partition them in hopes of gaining speed.

To clarify, it's not as if accessing a file requires searching all of those physical disks. Basically, the File Table is located on the first disk and it directs the flow to the proper disk from that point. On a normal drive with no fragmentation problem, that means there will only be two internal disk seek operations on most file accesses. That means you MIGHT possibly gain .002 seconds on a typical drive, if you are lucky.

The only speed advantage I can imagine from multi-partitioning would be when performing a surface scan on one drive using chkdsk /r. But then, that isn't needed often.

There are reasons that may justify multi-partitioning a drive but speed isn't one of them.

 

This is true.
Chris.

 

If you have the drives use them, but bigger is better. If you meant: making smaller partitions on your drive, I believe 2 partition is ideal, system and data (3 if you have a recovery partition), I think that more [small] partitions tends to "fragment/ limit" the use of your free space.

The advantage to separating data from system is smaller back-ups. Ounce separated you could clone you system and data to 2 of your other disks. Lately I also have been installing to a program files folder on the data drive to make the system partition even smaller.

Depending on what you do with your computer, or course additional [large] drives or partitions will be very useful. I use a 1 Tb for recorded TV and a 500 Gb for Back-up images, each have 2 partitions (system and data).