Question about reformatting a PC drive...

[Ral-Clan]

I'm not a member of any Windows/PC forums, so I thought that rather than registering there for one single question I'd ask the knowledgeable folks here:

Hi, I just discovered that the 40GB hard drive on my computer has a small, unused partition with IBM OS/2 installed (I bought the computer used). Windows XP (my operating system) resides on a 35GB partition of this hard drive, while OS/2 resides on a partition taking up the remaining 5GB.

The OS/2 partition is just a waste of space - it won't even boot and I never intend to use it. So I'm wondering how I can re-format this whole 40GB drive to a single partition without having to reinstall Windows from scratch.  I'm wondering it I can back up my Windows installation and restore it once I've reformatted the drive (which is how I would do it if it was AmigaOS).

I currently use Nero BackitUp for my backup jobs.  It reads the Windows XP partition and makes an archive.  I wonder if I can just restore the archive to the new 40GB partition....but I'm worried that when restoring a backup Nero might require the partition to be EXACTLY the same size as the one that was read from (I think it scans and then writes based on cylinders, not files and directories).

Anybody know it what I want to do is possible?

[Ral-Clan]

Download and install this:

http://www.partition-tool.com/personal.htm

Delete the OS/2 partition and resize the XP partition to the full size of the disk.

It's a good idea to take a backup of any important files before you do this in case something goes wrong.

Wow!  So it's possible to resize a partition without destroying the data in that partition?  Meaning I can enlarge my Windows XP partition without having to do a restore or reinstallation?

[Ral-Clan]

Thanks guys! Partition Master got the job done.