Best way to merge partitions?

I own a M15x and I am at the moment trying to dual boot Vista 32 and Vista 64, Normaly I have no trouble doing this, so I have acronis disk director and I made two partitions. the hard drive my machine has is a small solid state drive, bout 120 gigs. I split that drive into two partitions and I wanted to merge them back into one partition and now I cant do it.

I can't do it with the vista options, the "extend" option is greyed out and in disk director when I go to "merge" instead of merging the partition it just converts it to unallocated space. so I am stuck and I have no way to get it back the way it was.

Any ideas? thanks

 

a far as I'm aware you can't, you can select 1 and delete then extend the 1 remaining don't quote me on that through,
Or you can download a 3rd party program like partition magic and see what options that gives.

 

You do have backups, right?

 

You should be able to extend... tell me which side of partition you are trying to merge it with.. what type of partition is it (Primary/Secondary)

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if thats ur config then you cant extend... but sure u can use partition magic to do the job. but not recommended as you have to move all the system files back in front...

 

You can use Gnome Partition Editor (otherwise known as GPartEd Live). It's free and runs on bootup. It will allow you to delete your unwanted partition into unallocated space and then extend your other one to absorb that unallocated space. I have done this several times with my various systems, in fact I used it on my m17x when I removed my dual-boot configuration. It works perfectly. Go download the .iso (just google GPartEd Live) and burn it to disk and boot it up.

When you tried to use Vista disk manager, and it changed it to unallocated space, did you still not have the option to extend?

 

It will not give an option to extend if the free space is on the left hand side (or in the beginning) . You should not try to move the partition on the left hand side as Vista has like any other OS many system files in the initial sectors of the partition. Touching the System files could lead to a non-bootable partition. I believe Mystik had a very bad experience with Gnome Partition Editor and left with no option but to reinstall everything.


Mystik??

 

I don't need Mystik's confirmation of a bad experience with GPartEd. It doesn't prove anything aside from the norm. One or two bad experiences occur in EVERYTHING. Does it mean we should write them all off? If that were the case, I'm sure no one here would use Vista, and no one would drive cars either. As I stated before, I have NEVER had a problem with GPartEd, and if the OP otherwise would have to do a clean wipe, as you suggest, then why shouldn't he at least try all other options?

 

You forgot... no one would use m15x either. Agreed to what you said, but disk partitioning is not a piece of cake - specially when it comes to using advanced tool to edit the partition table and moving/merging data. If I would be he, I would be fine with using DISTPART and do it from within Vista. GPartEd is not a bad tool and bad experiences are usually because of human errors. My recommendations are, take a backup of data that you need and reinstall everything... you would save yourself lots of time and avoid frustration.

Ohh... btw do we have a Windows vs Linux fight ? I guess not as I love both worlds

 

The only thing I can say about GpartEd after all my experiences is: It works, but for NTFS, do a checkdisk to fix the MFT's before doing anything else.

Gparted doesn't have FULL NTFS support, it will only reassign files in the MAIN MFT, so if you lose it, you'll be up a river of something that smells, without something to try to save yourself with

after you move, resize or change IN ANY WAY, an NTFS partition with GpartEd, be sure to reboot into windows, and do a full check of the drive (I believe the recommendation was: chkdsk /f )... this should fix the MFTs and make them properly readable, and correct.

My problem was I resized the partition with Gparted, which involved moving some of the files at the end of the drive, forwards, which, then, obviously pushed other data around, etc etc. most of what was at the end of the drive happened to be my personal data... After resizing, I installed Vista 32-bit to try and fix my AlienFX problem. which it did... but It also overwrote my boot sectors, new MBR and bootloader, compliments of Vista 32. Now I had no access to my x64 Vista, or my Ubuntu partitions.

In an effort to try and restore Grub, The Partition tables, the MBR, and the MFT were all overwritten. Since I hadn't fixed the disk after the event with Gparted, all my data became lost on the drive. (it was still there, but there were absolutely no addresses for it, so, at best, I'd get a bunch of files without names... and if the data was encrypted, the files would detect as random data, and the file would be completely missing. )

So in conclusion, Gparted is awesome, but be sure to Checkdisk any NTFS drives directly after.

Don't put it off, because you NEVER KNOW what might happen. those backup MFTs are your lifeline.

 

True, it's not cake, but it's not that difficult, as GPartEd works much like Vista's Disk Manager. But, I digress. As for the Windows vs Linux, there is no fight as both have their qualities and I use both of them. (by the way, Linus Torvalds feels the same way)

 

/agree, the linux fanboys humor me.

I use Windows a lot for my work-related stuff (currently, school), but for day-to-day, just browsin' and fiddling around with the usual stuff, I enjoy Linux. (though I can still do everything in windows)...

They both have merits, and they both have issues. No reason or need to say one is better than the other.

 

Hey guys, sorry for not replying sooner, I have used vista's disk manager and acronis disk director suite. even if I have a bunch of unallocated space. even if I have a bunch of unallocated space, I cannot extend my partition. even in acronis disk manager, for some reason if I try to merge the partitions nothing works. I wish there was just a button that could put them all together and just make it the way it was before.

I dont really mind if I end up with a broken or unbootable system, as you can recall in my previews threads. I am in the process of installing both vista 32 and 64 on this machine. so I am willing to try everything. I dont mind

 

Software such as Partition Magic and Partition Commander can merge partitions without data loss. Do I recommend it? Not really, it's always risky to merge partitions with data on it. You should backup the data somewhere, then recreate or delete/extend the partition(s) that you need.

 

screenshot of Disk Manager or director... want to see how does the partition table looks like.

 

Try this free program, it works great: http://www.partition-tool.com/personal.htm

 

I can't remember 100% but I thought Partition Magic would do this.

 

Ok finaly after moving and cuting and pasting and adding and taking etc. etc. etc... i managed to make it work and got it to just one partition again.. funny thing is now alien respawn doesnt work. not that I care.. but if I resapwn the machine I start geting bluscreens every 10 minutes and need to reboot.. my guess is because respawn is being installed in a different machine now. since I made so many partitions, it installs the respawn thinking it is the same computer when its just a bit different and thats enough to break it down.. so I went on and deleted that partition as well and merged it with the main one.. who needs the respawn anyways. I installed both vista 64 and 32 with dual boot and none of them give me any problems now.

 

Glad you made it through.

 

thanks man