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Merging partitions with Partition Magic V12
My laptop came with Vista on one hard drive having three partitions, one for Vista, Data, and Recovery. I then added another internal SATA drive and made a live copy of the first drive. I then had two drives with a total of 6 partitions. That was manageable, although not what I wanted, being an obsessive fanatic about backups, I added an ESATA drive and copied to that guy.
I then had three drives with nine partitions. Way too much confusion.
After installing Windows 7 I decided to fix this partition nightmare, so bought the latest version of Partition Magic V12.
The first objective was Disk 2 shown on the attached snip. I have created and deleted the last two partitions to the right, formatted them, tried to merge them, resize them, etc., over and over, with no luck. I want those two merged into "D" on that drive to have one large drive.
I have tried to merge them as various combinations of NTFS formatted, unallocated, and/or free space, and finally gave up last night. The error message I get is shown in the other snip pic.
PM will not let me merge the drives or even resize them inside Win 7.
Booting to the PM Recovery DVD offers very few options, there is no merge that I can find, but there is a resize. So, I wanted to resize D to capture the unallocated space and the free space. It won't let me do it.
To merge partitions, they should be partitioned the same way, right? Formatted to NTFS? For some reason, I cannot get them to merge or resize no matter what their status.
Eventually, I want three large hard drives with only one partition on each one. For now, I will be happy just fixing one at a time. Having 9 is terrible!