Back to basics: OS Partition Full

[PCNewb]

Recently bought a laptop from another user. Was received, but as soon as booted up i'm getting disk full messages. hdd is put in two partitions. OS is XP Home on a 5.62g partition. 7mb space left, and it still needs windows updated. the other partition is 74g free only thing i can think of is to reformat/delete partitions and make 1 only. but in doing this, i'd lose the stored info for the gateway restore CD, so i'd lose my OS. theres no unallocated space, so i can't extend. is there anything i can use to change it to 1 partition without reformating? removed everything possible.

 

[tbalon]

A program called "Partition Magic" should be able to merge the two partitions and move the data on the second partition into a file on the first partition while doing the merge.

 

[lxskllr]

Gparted is free, and can do the same thing. You should always backup your important data before screwing with the partitions though. I've never had an issue, but losing something important over laziness is lame.

 

[RebateMonger]

Gparted is free, and can do the same thing. You should always backup your important data before screwing with the partitions though.

I'd never had an opportunity to try Gparted before, but I walked a friend through it with an older Sony laptop that came with a small XP OS partition and an underutilized data partition.

The best that the built-in Sony System Restore partition would allow was a 50/50 partition distribution. He wanted everything on a single partition.

I had him copy all of his important data elsewhere, then he deleted the data partition and expanded the OS partition to fill the disk. It all worked fine.

 

[Modelworks]

The XP partition is only 5.6GB but the other partition is over 74GB ? That is one odd install.