Chaps - I posted a query about external hard-drives for which I thank you all for the great replies.

Anyway - my existing drive is partitioned into C+D drive. I can find my way round computers pretty well but have never partitioned or unpartitioned a drive.

Any ideas where to start?

**Warning**
If you follow these instructions you will wipe all data from your drive.

if you don't mind loosing all the info on the drive, and you are using MS-DOS, then you just use fdisk, which partitions or un partitions the drive.
Type fdisk
and you get in to the program..

After you have deleted the partitions and remade a large partition, you then re format the volume,
Format c:/s

/s will make it a system volume and therefore bootable.
If it's not your system disk use

format c:

You mentioned an external drive.
usually a removeable drive doesn't need partitioning.

But you can usually format removeable optical disks with a command called afdisk. If they are screwed up.

this is not standard with dos though and usually comes with extra drivers with a scsi card.

Its not the external - its my main drive with the OS, many games etc so I'd prefer not to wipe it!!!!

Think you want to try something like Partition Magic, have a quick Google for it. When doing anything like this though it is important to make an extra backup of all data, in addition to your normal backup routine.

Then I think you can use a program called partition magic as a last resort. Although I have never see or used it.

If it was me. Then I would buy a brand new [probably bigger] hard disk and start again with a new installation, which is fresh and the machine will run much faster.

Although if you copy the whole of your main disk onto a bigger one before you start, all your data will be safe.
I seriously wouldn't do anything unless you can make a safe copy of all your stuff..

As has been already mentioned, Partitionmagic will do the job of making your two partitions as one.

Another vote for Partition Magic. One of the "must have" applications for serious computer users. I have used it for many years, partitioned & resized many drives and have never had a single failure or any loss of data. Well worth the £40

Originally posted by Cols
Another vote for Partition Magic. One of the "must have" applications for serious computer users. I have used it for many years, partitioned & resized many drives and have never had a single failure or any loss of data. Well worth the £40
It won't do mine, because it says each has a system information folder on it.They are both 0 bytes but I can not delete them.

I personally wouldn't touch Partition Magic (again) after a couple of bad experiences.

A great little tool is system rescue CD available from http://www.sysresccd.org/ and unlike Partition Magic it's free.

Don't be put of by the linux logo you don't really need to know about linux because the partitioning side of it is done using a simple GUI.

You just download the disk image (110MB) and burn it as a bootable CD. Restart your system with the CD in the drive and hopefully it will boot from the CD (sometimes you need to press a key whilst it's booting or change the boot order in BIOS). When you eventually get to a command line just type "run_qtparted". You will then get a very straight forward GUI with all your partitions listed. Just select which one's you want to delete and then select which one you want to expand. None of the changes take effect until you select "File" and then "Commit" from the menu so don't worry if you make a mistake.

You can also skrink a partition down (obviously only recapturing unused space) and expand another partition. Useful if you want to copy across data from one partition to another to make room to eventually delete the smaller partition.

I'm not sure if you've considered this but any programs you've installed on the drive you are going to get rid of (D: I would imagine), will probably need uninstalling and then reinstalling to make sure all the install locations are correct.

Personally I would do what muddycoffee suggested and buy a new hard drive. You should definatly copy anything you don't want to lose onto some form of media (CD, DVD, second drive etc). If your going to mess about with partitions you should be fully prepared for it to go wrong. Buying a second hard drive is by far the easiest option.

Incidently, buying a second drive can also slightly speed up your PC if you run the swap file from one drive and OS/Applications from another (although, for best results, they need to be on seperate IDE cables if your using PATA drives).