Solved Can I merge all three partitions in Vista?

Having two internal hard drives, and an Esata backup drive, gives me 9 partitions [including Recovery] and none of the drive letters are in sequence of make sense.

It is very confusing. I asked this forum once if I should set the drive names but was advised to avoid the possible confusion with programs.

I originally wanted to keep vista pure on one drive, and everything else in the easily copied data drive. But most programs give you no installation option, and they get "jammed" into C drive. So much for that idea.

My Question: using the lastest PartitionMagic, do I dare "copy\merge" the data partition into the Vista partition [ignoring dups for the moment] and then delete the data partition and that totally useless recovery partition? And have one large drive? [or three, actually]

I would LOVE to have three hard drives with just three letters.

Hello Robert,

Could you post a screenshot of your Disk Management to see how your drives are layed out? This can help to see what you may be looking at to do this.

If you have a OEM recovery partition, then doing this will lose that partition and the ability to do a factory restore of Vista unless you create a set of OEM "Vista recovery disc" and a OEM "Applications and Drivers" disk from this partition first. If this is the case, then please post back what brand is your computer. I will post back instructions on how from your computer manufacturer's website.

Believe me, I did NOT choose this strange number sequence. Vista did this as I added drives.

I clicked attachment--did it show?


Asus G50. I have been on the phone with their tech supporto for about three hours last night and tonight. There is no repair. They only offer "scorched earth" recovery, which I have on a CD. I certainly don't need it in three partition. Tech support said it was possible to copy/paste data into Vista, knowing I would lose some links, but compared to the entire weekends I have spend on this same issue in the past, I figure why not?

That would be the Computer window. It needs to be Disk Management (diskmgmt.msc) like the one below instead to see how the disks are layed out.

Sorry

BTW: my Esata is a total copy, so if this idea dies, I can easily stick that SATA drive into the laptop. This is why i backup this way.

Using your PartitionMagic, you can move around the free space on a single disk to any of the partitions on that same disk. However, to make each disk one partition (drive) again, it will require deleting all 3 partitions on a disk to merge them as one and reinstalling anything that was on them again. That's going to be a lot of backing up of anything that you do not want to lose to accomplish this.

Thanks. Compared to ENTIRE weekends spend installing my stuff after another non-recoverable Vista crash, and then installing everything new, another wasted weekend will at least give me 3 drives and only 3 partitions instead of the mind-boggling and confusing 9 partitions.

thanks again

You're welcome Robert. You could probably use the external to back up to as you do each disk.

ONe question: don't I need to keep a tiny 'boot section' FAT32 on the first partition?

Robert,

No, Vista uses NTFS and handles all of it for you during installation.

Many thanks!

As expected, I am having a nightmare merging/deleting partitions! PM just does not want to do it! But I only need to completely one drive, and then live copy to the others.\

But it's far more work than expected. I think I'll have to boot to PM and do it there.
I just can't get it to work while active.

The plan was to do this with drive 2 while drive 1 is active, but PM just won't do it.

I have not yet taken the plunge, but one question: both 'diskmgmt.msc' and Partition Manager agree that:
disk 0 is the external ESATA drive
disk 1 is the second drive listed in boot manager [when I boot up]
disk 2 is the first drive listed. [C:\]

It would seem that disk 0 should be the first drive, but it's disk 2, the second internal laptop drive. Is this odd? Or since it works, just ignore it?

thanks

Robert,

Could you post a screenshot of your Disk Management? This way I can be sure of you drive layout first.

one more try:

It lists your DISK 1 as the boot drive. Normally DISK 0 is, but it's not uncommon for this to happen when multibooting operating systems. I'm not sure how your external drive became DISK 0 though.

What makes it more confusing, is that no matter what OS you boot into, it's partition or drive will show as the C: drive.

When you do this, be sure to not delete the C: drive listed on DISK 1 in the image above since this is your boot drive.

Thanks.
Yes, I am confused too. For now, I would be happy to just delete the recovery partitions [useless for me] and merge into the next partition.

At the same time, I am nervous about taking this step.

I have learned one thing for sure: vista boots to "a drive" and expects to see "winload.exe" and if cannot see it, you are cooked. Changing partitions run the risk of changing drive letters and therefore changing the location of where vista "thinks" winload should be located.

I spent an entire weekend solving this one when I added a thumb drive before booting up. It skewed the drive letters, I guess. Called Asus Tech and they said this was a common problem with complaints about vista, at least on the Asus G50.

You should boot up and THEN add or remove extra USB things. They said that even though it should work fine, never add a new USB device to a machine when off, and then boot. Plus, never have a USB device working, shut down, and then take the device out. The next boot could be a problem.

They agreed it should not happen, but it does on this laptop make/model.