about combining harddrives

[mmaakkee]

ok when i open my comp i have 2 options to choose from to boot from C drive which is xp home edition. OR from D drive xp pro now i want to combine the C and D drives together how do i do that?

[MobilePCPhysician]

Which install do you want to keep? Are these separate hard drives? Or is it one drive partitioned?

[mmaakkee]

its one drive partitioned and i want to keep the data from C drive but i want to delete home edition and combine em

[NooNoo]

If you have xp home on the c partition, you will need to remove it and install pro. You cannot install one over the other without creating yourself mighty headaches.

You can use something like partition magic to combine the partitions, but I would advise against it.... it is better to have c: as the windows partition and d: as a data partition... that way if you have to format c, you can without affecting the data on d

I would copy ALL your data over to d, then format c and install xp pro. Then you can remove the windows directory in d: Of course you are going to have to reinstall any programs, but your data should be ok on d.

Best practice would be to back up all your data anyway which ever path you decide to take.

[mmaakkee]

but i was thinking if i just copy the data ffrom C to D then combine them since xp pro is already installed onto my D drive

[NooNoo]

You will have to do a repair install of xp, since you will be losing the boot files from the c drive.

BACKUP first.... messing with partitions is always risky.