Combine Partions?

I recently bought a f3sv-a1. And it came with two partions. I have already filled a decent ammount of the hard drive. But is there a way to combine the partions without losing the data?

 

Yes with a program like partition magic its possible. I think vista has the ability to do it as well but not sure on that.

Its not like you gain any extra space by combinding them tho, you just make it one partition. If you think it over you may find its better *in my opinion* to have 2 or more partitions. Where one holds your OS and maybe games and stuff, but the other can hold all of your media and files ect..

The point being that when the day comes that your computer gets fubared and you have to format the drive to fix it. You can just format and install the OS onto the partition the OS was on and keep all your media and data on the other partition untouched. Also you can just move anything to that partition before the format that you want to save. Much quicker and much less painfull than backing it up to dvd's or something.

Also note in your case since this is a asus notebook I believe that partion is a emergency recovery partition, its not really all that important but it can be convenient, and its probably not very big in size.

 

Well heres the reason i wanted to combine them. I wanted to use windows media center. But all the media comes from the "Music", "Videos", and "Pictures" folders from the C drive, which is also the VistaOS Drive. I dont know how to use media center with songs and videos from the D "Data" drive?

I just have videos in various folders?

 

I would decrease the size of one drive if needed(so you can increase the other partition) with like Acronis's partition program or partition magic and then transfer the files manually from one partition to the other (drag and drop).

And then go back into the partitioning software and simply delete the know unneeded partition and then expand the primary partition with the OS into the now unused space.

Personally I separate my OS from my Data and I relocate the default Program Files folder into the other partition so if I have to reload the OS I can. I also try and stick with Portable versions of any and all applications I possibly can so that if I screw up the OS from tweaks or whatever I can still access my applications or at least have a list of what I need to reinstall.

It also works well in a dual boot environment between Vista and XP =).

 

Id not do that, Id just manually add the files to the windows media center library... they can be on a seperate drive or partition, just the auto scan wont pick them up. You have to add them manually wich is pretty easy.

 

You'll need a third party app to do this. A word of caution if you decide to do this - backup your HD! I tried Paragon Partition Manager to change my partitions and it made my HD non-bootable. I finally had to reformat the whole drive (no big deal as I had everything backed up) and doing a clean install - a blessing in disguise really - vista is much faster and I now have 3 partitions