Re: Delete Partiontion on HDD

Deon wrote:

Hi there,

WIN XP Prof

I had a hardware failure on the HDD and had to have it replaced. The guy and the compu shop created two partitions on the HDD. I don't like to have my HDD partitioned into two drives.

The XP Prof CD with SP2 on it, does not have the option to boot from CD for me to have access to the command prompt. Neither does it have fdisk on it.

How do I delete this second partition? I want to do this before re-installing all my software.

Regards,
Deon

Not sure what you mean when you say the XP CD "does not have the option to boot from CD for me..." All retail and generic OEM XP CDs allow you to boot from the CD. From there you can repair XP, install it, or enter the recovery console. Are you setting the computer's BIOS for the CD to be the first boot device? From the recovery console you can run diskpart from which you could delete the 2nd partition, however you won't be able to combine it with the first partition to make a single one. You can also delete the non system partition from within XP using the Disk Management console. Neither way will allow you to non destructively combine the two partitions into one, however. XP's tools aren't capable of that.

One option is to reinstall windows and in so doing delete the two current partitions, create one new partition encompassing the entire drive and install to that one.

Another option is to use one of the 3rd party partitioning programs such as Symantec's Partition Magic. That one is costly. There is also BootIt Next Generation (BING) which offers a 30 day free, full featured trial version that will repartition the drive non destructively.

It is not a bad idea to have two partitions, one for the OS and programs, and a second for data. Keeping data separated on it's own partition makes backup easier, and allows for a reinstall of the OS without harming data.

--
Rock
MS MVP Windows - Shell/User

.

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