Partitioning woes :/

On my desktop I've got my 250GB main drive divided up into two partitions, a 60GB C: partition that holds the OS and programs, and a 190GB D: partition that holds data. To reconcile my desktop system's file storage organization with that of my laptop (to make it easier for me to synchronize files), I'm trying to merge the two partitions together into a single partition.

Problem is, Acronis Disk Director Suite is encountering some sort of error while trying to perform the merge operation (or indeed, any other partitioning operation). This is strange, since I had originally used ADDS to create the two partitions on the drive several months ago and it worked flawlessly then. Even odder, Vista's built-in partitioning tool (accessed through Disk Management...yes Windows finally has partitioning functions!) also encounters an unspecified error and can't do anything with the partitions.

I ran a full check of the hard drive, including a scan to find and fix any bad sectors (it found none). S.M.A.R.T. info shows the drive as healthy with no issues. I'm at a loss as to what to do...I would really prefer not to have to image my OS/program partition to another drive and then manually copy over my data, when a simple partition merger should do the trick. Any ideas on what the problem might be?


Oh and as far as system configuration goes, my desktop is an Athlon 64 3000+ on an nForce4 SLI board, running Vista Ultimate 32-bit.

 

I don't have much experience with merging/splitting partitions, but I'm not at all surprised that Vista's partitioning tool won't merge two partitions when one of them is a boot partition (FYI, XP had a partitioning tool, too). Microsoft doesn't like messing around with boot partitions. Some of my fellow techs swear by Partition Magic, but I'm not sure that would solve your issue, either.

One round-about method you might try would be to image your OS/program partition, delete that partition, merge the 60 GB partition with your 190 GB partition, and then flash the OS image onto that partition.

That's about as round-about as the method you described, though, so you may not want to take that route.

 

Check out the free program "gparted" (Google it) and see if that program can do the trick for you.

 

I'm probably going to have to take that route, like it or not. I've never tried modifying an active partition with an OS on it before, so that may well be the issue. My guess is that if Acronis doesn't do the trick, Partition Magic isn't going to work either.

I looked into that a bit. Being that it's Linux-based, it may well be able to work around issues that would be encountered with Windows programs. However, I have virtually zero Linux knowledge or experience, and installing another OS to run partitioning program seems counter-productive. Maybe if I get really desperate...

Thanks for the responses. Gonna spend another day or two reading up on options before I finally dive in, one way or another.

 

There's a gparted "LiveCD" you can burn so you don't have to install Linux... you can just run it off the CD.