Partition Magic question

[Harsky]

So my sister has a laptop which was bought brand new... in 2002 and as such the hard drive is 40gb but for some reason it's split into 2 drives (drive C and drive D, 20gb each). This never really bothered her as back then, the laptop was really only ever used for typing and the occasional browsing but now when she asked me to check her laptop, she only had 1gb left in drive C but she never touched anything in drive D. My question is, if I use Partition Magic to combine both drive into one single drive, will I lose any data and have to format?

 

[raulpica]

IIRC, using Paragon Partition Manager, you can do this without losing any data. Did this some months ago, if I remember correctly.

Not too sure, though

You could try to do it, if then it warns you about data loss, never mind

 

[xcalibur]

While this topic is made I thought I might as well add in my own question.
Is there any way to change the filesystem used by a drive without actually having to format and erase all data on that drive?
I have a FAT32 C drive and a NTFS D drive and my C drive is driving me nuts (sorry!). I want to change its filesystem but I'm not sure I can without having to do a complete format.

 

[Samutz]

So my sister has a laptop which was bought brand new... in 2002 and as such the hard drive is 40gb but for some reason it's split into 2 drives (drive C and drive D, 20gb each). This never really bothered her as back then, the laptop was really only ever used for typing and the occasional browsing but now when she asked me to check her laptop, she only had 1gb left in drive C but she never touched anything in drive D. My question is, if I use Partition Magic to combine both drive into one single drive, will I lose any data and have to format?

Backup anything on D: that you might need to keep.

Then either;
-Delete D:.
-Resize C: to fill extra space

OR

-Use PM's Merge function (I have not tried this though, I always delete and resize)

While this topic is made I thought I might as well add in my own question.
Is there any way to change the filesystem used by a drive without actually having to format and erase all data on that drive?
I have a FAT32 C drive and a NTFS D drive and my C drive is driving me nuts (sorry!). I want to change its filesystem but I'm not sure I can without having to do a complete format.

CONVERTING FAT32 to NTFS
(Does not require a format)

(Edit: Below question was answered on IRC)

 

[xcalibur]

CONVERTING FAT32 to NTFS
(Does not require a format)

Umm.. I see it says in the instruction I should boot a floppy...
I don't have one...

Do I really need to do all that stuff beforehand or could I skip to the last step?

 

[raulpica]

While this topic is made I thought I might as well add in my own question.
Is there any way to change the filesystem used by a drive without actually having to format and erase all data on that drive?
I have a FAT32 C drive and a NTFS D drive and my C drive is driving me nuts (sorry!). I want to change its filesystem but I'm not sure I can without having to do a complete format.

IIRC, yes, Paragon Partition Magic is your friend.