Partition unifying

[raiden-kun]

Hello,
I have a 1.5TB hard disk that has a 500GB partition and no partition in the rest of the space.
I now want to have a full 1.5TB NTFS partition. I havent formated the remaining space yet so I can find the best way to do this.
Should I format the remaining space and use some software to unify the partitions? Is this possible? Will my data be ok? Or is there a better way?
(transferring all the data to another HDD would be really troublesome since all my other HDDs are under 500GB)

Thx in advance

 

[raiden-kun]

Thank you very much. But exactly how unsafe is it? What could happen? All this data is of great importance to me, and making backups between other HDDs and DVD will take me many days. Could my data become irrecoverable?

 

[raiden-kun]

BTW, I don't care about rebooting or anything, I just want my data to be ok. And also I noticed EASEUS has a "Merge partitions" feature. Will formating the remaining 1TB and merge the 2 partitions be safer? Thx

 

[raiden-kun]

Actually I just found this in their website:
"In fact, EASEUS Partition Master do not provide a "Merge" button, as there is huge risk of losing data or system crash if merge partitions directly. To protect your data, you can use "Resize/Move" function and this is the safest way."
Logically I would think merging is better since there is no formating involved but seams not...


(sorry for the triple post but for some reason I cant use Edit)

 

[Freeduck]

For less than $70 you can buy an external hard drive to back up your data. Don't rely on 1 hard drive. Allways back up your data even if you don't repatition or reformat a hard drive. http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=2010150414%20131021357&bop=And&Order=PRICE
A free utility to partition hard drives is Gnome Partition Editor: http://gparted.sourceforge.net/
Anything could go wrong: power failure, CPU locking. Repartitioning takes a couple of hours. Don't hope nothing will go wrong. Transfer your data to another drive before you start.

 

[raiden-kun]

Best answer selected by raiden-kun.

 

[raiden-kun]

(I pressed best anwser accidentally )

Thank you Freeduck. I cant afford another 1.5TB HDD, but normally I would have all the data backed up between other HDDs and DVDs since Im aware of how sensitive hard disks are.

About what could go wrong, power failure can always happen but we cant take it into account really; CPU locking I have no idea what it is; but as long as I can use one of those data recovery softwares its not too bad, and since I have another hard drive for the OS new data wont get written over in case of failure.

But I would really like to hear some more opinions on this before I decide weather or not to expand my partition