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    P-7811 FX upgrading a partitioned HDD

    Discussion in 'Gateway and eMachines' started by Talarius, Dec 13, 2012.

  1. Talarius

    Talarius Newbie

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    I purchased a slightly used Gateway P-7811 FX on eBay in 2008 and have been happy with it, but it is getting quite long in the tooth now and have decided to upgrade it to squeeze some more life out of it.

    I'm going to upgrade from 4gb to 8gb of RAM, replace the HDD and possibly upgrade the CPU to a T9900 if the first two go smoothly.

    Here's the issue I'm concerned about:
    The original owner of the laptop partioned the HDD into two equal volumes of 88gb. I'm going to replace this with a new 750gb drive and would like to clone the old drive (I've found basic instructions here already), but I would like to ditch these partitions as I find it annoying to have the OS and some of my programs and files on one partition and the rest of my stuff on the other. I'd prefer to keep everything in a single partition. Is it possible to clone a partitioned drive and then somehow un-partition it? If so, how?

    Thanks very much. I've built a couple desktops from scratch in the dim past, but I've never messed around with a laptop before, so I'm a little nervous about the impending modifications.
     
    Talarius, Dec 13, 2012
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  2. Syngensmyth

    Syngensmyth In All Seriousness

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    I would clone the OS partition, then enlarge it to full disk size and copy from the old second partition. Actually I would use two partitions but to each his own. On second thought I would use an SSD for my OS.
     
    Syngensmyth, Dec 14, 2012
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