Winxp - Merging Primary With Logical Partition

on my Windows XP SP3 pc i have 3 partitionsC:\ system (Primary - 40GB)D:\ data1 (Logical - 60GB)E:\ data2 (Primary - 8GB)anyone recommend me a tool (FREE ofcourse) that will allow me to merge partition D and E? i've tried easeus home edition and with it's merging option it only allows a merge between C and D or C and E i'm after a solution that will allow me not to shift/copy data around... i know on D:\ and E:\ i have nothing... but currently if i can't find a way i will reside to copying data from C into another PC before i reformat the whole Hard Disk Drivecheers

I know you don't want to shift-copy but...Your E: disk is rather small, so I would simply copy it's content to your D: disk.Then boot on the gparted CD (or off a Linux distro including gpartted) and simply delete your E: partition, and then enlarge the D: disk, expanding it on the whole free space.gparted is free, so it meets your specs

thanks yordan, does gparted support USB boot? i have nothing in E or D that i need... i shifted data in both drives to C... i'm just curious because E is primary and D is logical... i'll give it a go and see ta

The gparted people explain how to boot it from USB here : http://gparted.sourceforge.net/liveusb.php

shot yordan have got unetbootin and just downloading Gparted... i'm gonna have to do some reading to reflash my memory on primary and logical partitions

i'm gonna have to do some reading to reflash my memory on primary and logical partitions

Don't worry with that. Create primary partitions as loong as you don't need more than four ones.

cheers yordan... is there an advantage or difference between the two tho?

It's ms-dos historical.If you need to make rather small partitions (typically 2 gigs) and if you have small disks (typically 9 gigs) you need to have several disks, so you first exhaust the maximum 4 primary partitions (one per physical disk) and then you add logical partitions in order to have several small partitions until each disk is full.Why small partitions ? Because FAT16 was only able to manage small partitions.

thanks yordan... the man! anyways Gparted is a pretty handy tool...

You are right, gparted is a pretty handy tool.It's one of the tools you always need to carry with you.Clonezilla is the second one. Do you have a working backup of your system disk?

You are right, gparted is a pretty handy tool.It's one of the tools you always need to carry with you.
Clonezilla is the second one. Do you have a working backup of your system disk?

um no i don't

um no i don't

So you have to test cloneZilla.You backup your C: disk to a file of your USB disk.
In case of crash, you restore the disk from the backup.

thanks yordan for the headsup... kept Gparted iso on my valuable archives