Hi

I purchased my son a new laptop but it has two partitions, one 24.1GB which is drive C and it shows 29.8GB as drive D.

Now, it doesn't come with any back up discs as it's one of these cheap machines that has the operating system tatooed on the hard drive.

My question, how do I make the drive one whole drive, no partition, just drive C, it's driving me nuts, I tried to load in a copy of XP over the Vista, tried to boot from CD but it won't let me format the hard drive or install XP.

The only solution I can come up with is to buy a new hard drive and install XP on that, but surely there has to be a way ???

Any advice will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

partition magic should be able to do that for you.mind i havent used it in yonks

I believe there is a way to combine partitions in XP so id have though vista would too. But anyways, if you cant...
go to www.bookdisk.com and download an image (something like win98 boot disk will do)
Run the image exe and it will write a bootdisk to floppy.
Boot from the floppy and run fdisk fom the command prompt. Delete both partitions and create one full size one. Reboot and then run format. Reboot and boot from your XP CD.

custard said:

partition magic should be able to do that for you.mind i havent used it in yonks

Click to expand...

dont use Magic, its known for screwing up your PC big style

I use Paragon Hard Disk Manager 8 Professional -worked fine when I did some partition work recently, when sorting out my dual-boot.

Been Using Partition Magic since 1999 Never had a problem with it.

Dead easy to use and can fix your prob without you having to format anything.

Just MAKE SURE you follow its instructions.

Thank you guys, will try this tonight and let you know how it goes.........

back up first

Managed to do it, all sorted, mind you I have to say I don't like this Windows Vista, seems like it has too much control, too much safety checking, every blooming this is ,yes, ok, or continue, it runs a lot slower too, I think it's resource heavy, my kids have it, I'll stick with XP..........................

Then turn off UAC, etc.

I turned off UAC after about an hour of setting up Vista, now I only get a warning probably once a week, it's not hassle then. It's only during lots of fiddling (i.e. setting up) when it is annoying.

Hello chaps. partition now gone, all on one, Drive C, UAC switched off, but as far as I'm concerned this Vista makes machines slow.

My kids machines have, daughter Pentium M 470 + 1Gb DDR2 my sons AMD Turion MK36 + 1Gb DDR2, now although not top spec, they aren't bad for kiddies PCs, but they both came loaded with Vista and boy are they slow.

As I'm not up to speed with Vista, do you have any tips on making it quicker, my machine is light speed but I think this operating system would put the brakes on that too. Every time you click on something the animated circle has to spin for ten minutes before it opens up, argh, don't get me going, it's rubbish, give me XP anytime................................................

Put VISTA on your machine, and it will probably fly along - for starters, those cheapy laptops you bought only have 1GB each, not good.

I am running Vista Ultimate on this machine - 2GB RAM, P4 3.4Ghz, so older technology BUT it runs fine, even has a performance score of 4.4 which surprised me.

However, I still use XP as my main OS.

Stu, I'm also suprised at how much disk space Vista uses, it's ludicrous, three times as much as my XP64, shocking.............................

Could be something up with the machines? What are your scores on the rating system? I find Vista:

More stable
Easier and better to use (especially the search function)
'Prettier'

I don't see any downsides for my set up, or haven't yet. I do have a XP machine in reserve though. You could try a USB drive for ReadyBoost though I think that is intended for 512 mb machines.

Mine is:

1.7 ghz Pentium-M
2 gb RAM
100 gb HDD
PCI-6600go GPU

Stuart DemonD said:

Then turn off UAC, etc.

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Very silly idea.. Just tell it to elavate tasks to administrator level. UAC is beneficial, over the crappy dialog boxes.

Turning it off is pointless.

MiG said:

Very silly idea.. Just tell it to elavate tasks to administrator level. UAC is beneficial, over the crappy dialog boxes.

Turning it off is pointless.

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It is only Savi end of the day, you may think it is silly, good for you

It's not "pointless" at all - it has a point, to stop it bugging you with unnecessary warnings. It has downsides though. As I said before, after initial setting up, you don't tend to notice the once a week warning.

Stuart DemonD said:

It is only Savi end of the day, you may think it is silly, good for you

Click to expand...

Err, do all my threads have to be littered with sarcasm ???

Is it something I've done in a former life ???

This forum has become very, um, argumentative, controversial !!!

Too many opinionated people, go on flame me, I'm all yours !!!

The Negotiator said:

It's not "pointless" at all - it has a point, to stop it bugging you with unnecessary warnings. It has downsides though. As I said before, after initial setting up, you don't tend to notice the once a week warning.

Click to expand...

Bah... Read the post, you can create elevated prompts for all users, without turning UAC off. Its useful for limited accounts, amongst other things, it just doesn't sit there with annoying dialog boxes.



Much better than completely disabling it IMO.