Deleting partition to add to original drive?

[bison]

I've got a 250gb Seagate HDD and when I loaded XP Pro on this new build, I partitioned it into two drives. The C drive had 50gigs and the F (my two optical drives are D and E) came out to a little under 200.

I've since realized that 50gbs is way too small for my C drive and want to add the space from the partition back to it. Since I never formatted the F drive, I simply went to start-run-compmgmt.msc and deleted it. Computer Management is showing the physical drive as having 48.83 GB of space (formatted NTFS) and 184.05 GB of Free Space.

Is there any way to add the space back to my C drive without reformatting or losing my data?

 

[Guest]

Google for GParted.

Grumpy

 

[g-paw]

You could also use Partition Magic

 

[bison]

Thanks a lot for suggesting GParted! I always prefer freeware as I find them less bloated and leave less of a footprint on my system with registry changes and things like that (which is why I was somewhat wary of using Partition Magic [not to mention the price tag])

Anyway, it took me a little bit to figure out exactly how to use GParted but once I realized I needed to download the iso and create a boot CD, it was smooth sailing.

The GParted forums are great and I found a great suggestion for a freeware ISO burner (ISO Recorder), which is an absolutely awesome piece of freeware.

The only hiccup I ran into the entire time was that the boot CD didn't seem to like the DVI connection I had with my monitor so I had to switch to a VGA cable.

I know this is a bit of a rambling post but I'm just very impressed with how simple GParted was to use (though I do think figuring out how to burn an ISO might be difficult for an extremely novice user) and how effective it was. I'd definitely recommend this program to anyone looking to repartition their drives

Thanks again

 

[Guest]

No problem! Glad it worked for you.

Grumpy