[geeks] Quick NTFS Partition Q...

[Phil Stracchino]

On 07/25/10 17:17, Jonathan J. M. Katz wrote:
> Hey gang,
> 
> My dad has a Sony Vaio PC running XP that somehow came with two NTFS
> partitions. A 20G C: and a 100G D: drive. Of course, C: is full, D: is
> "nearly" empty but has some stuff on it.
> 
> Ideally I want to merge these partitions magically/seemlessly so it
> looks like 1 big disk with no data loss. Is this something that gpartd
> or qpartd can do these days? Or am I stuck wiping the D drive and then
> growing the C drive with the before-mentioned tools?

If you have room, download and install EASUS Partition Manager.  It's
functionally identical to PartitionMagic, but free.  Shrink the D:
partition, move it to the end of the disk, grow the C: partition, move
the data from D: onto C:, blow away D:, and grow C: again.

Or, you could boot it from a sysresccd and do the exact same thing with
gparted.  Any reasonably current version should be able to mount the
NTFS partitions read-write to move the data.

But you cannot, to my knowledge, simply seamlessly merge two existing
NTFS partitions into one as a single operation.  You need to use the
multi-step procedure above.


-- 
  Phil Stracchino, CDK#2     DoD#299792458     ICBM: 43.5607, -71.355
  alaric at caerllewys.net   alaric at metrocast.net   phil at co.ordinate.org
         Renaissance Man, Unix ronin, Perl hacker, Free Stater
                 It's not the years, it's the mileage.