HDD Partititon Changes in XP-HE

I installed XP home edition on a hard drive with four partitions. One partition was empty, F:, and has been converted to NTFS. I want to delete this partition and give the space to C:. The result will be three partitions. There is supposedly a utility on the XP CDROM called diskpart that is part of Recovery Console and will delete partitions. But if I do delete the partition will C: automatically take the unused space?

I did try to access Recovery Console from within XP to add it to my boot menu but it did not work. The help file says this is possible.

Anybody try this before?

I've never used it, but diskpart looks to be similar to FDISK, in that it can create or delete partitions. See here, and find diskpart: <a href="http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;Q307654" target="_blank">HOW TO: Install and Use the Recovery Console for Windows XP (Q307654)</a>

There is also disk management in the computer management snap-in, however neither this, nor diskpart will merge unused space to the system/boot partition. This is by design. It should be easily to add the free space to other partitions, perhaps as a spanned volume.

There is third party software that will perform what you are looking for. Find a version of Partition Magic that will work with XP...

[quote]Originally posted by Ya_know:
Find a version of Partition Magic that will work with XP...[/QB]<hr></blockquote>

It looks like that is my only option. I checked PowerQuest's web site and it states that PM 7.0 is XP friendly. Unfortunately, the full version is $70.

I tried installing diskpart as the instructions say but it didn't work and after reading everything I could find on diskpart it will only add or delete partitions; it will not merge them. Which is exactly what I want it to do.

Oh well, spend more money.

Thanks for the help Ya_know.