🎉 Celebrating 25 Years of GameDev.net! 🎉

Not many can claim 25 years on the Internet! Join us in celebrating this milestone. Learn more about our history, and thank you for being a part of our community!

Back to Hardware Discussion

I need help reconfiguring this hard drive

Hardware Discussion Technical

Started by Promit March 09, 2008 05:32 PM

2 comments, last by CrystalSitral 16 years, 4 months ago

Promit

13,404

Author

March 09, 2008 05:32 PM

I'll skip over the boring (but altogether reasonable) story of how this came to pass. I have a hard drive that looks like this:


[ 80 GB | 80 GB | 30 GB ]
    ^       ^       ^
    C       O       V

The bold 80 labeled C is a primary partition. The remaining 80 (O) and 30 (V) share an extended partition. The first 80 is my XP drive with all the programs and junk. O is uninteresting. V is a Vista RC1 installation. I want to combine C and O into a single partition, and leave V as is. I don't care about the contents of O and V. (I actively want them deleted, in fact.) I absolutely need C to be intact. I have an arbitrary amount of scratch space to back things up to. I'm using the Vista bootloader, so I'm guessing that my boot information resides on V. I'd like to switch back to the XP ntldr and make C the bootable partition. I think I can pull this off using the following steps: 1. Copy C off to backup 2. Destroy all partitions 3. Repartition the drive as 160 and 30. 4. Copy C back to the drive from backup 5. Run fixmbr and fixboot off the WinXP CD But I'm not 100% on whether that will work how I expect it to. So how should I go about this?

SlimDX | Ventspace Blog | Twitter | Diverse teams make better games. I am currently hiring capable C++ engine developers in Baltimore, MD.

guyver23

181

March 09, 2008 05:53 PM

Have you considered using something like the Parted Magic Live CD to delete the two partitions you don't want and then just extend C? From there, it should be as simple as using the Windows XP CD to restore the boot loader.

Pzc

216

March 09, 2008 06:14 PM

Another option would be to use Ultimate Boot CD [ultimatebootcd.com] since it has quite a lot of tools for various kinds of situations. The particular one for this case would be Cute Partition Manager [cutepm.com] which seems to be able to do what you want and is included on the ubcd.