I just got a new laptop running with Vista32. It's got a 500GB HDD with the OS already installed. As you can see, the HDD was set up with 4 partitions. I don't understand why a reputable computer store would configure the HDD this way. Anyways, is there a way in Vista to merge the 12GB and 3.49 GB recovery partitions together and expand the C: drive to include the unallocated 167.67GB ? I know how to expand and shrink partitions but I don't think Vista will manage merging/moving partitions. By the way, the OS is in German. I'm going to intall a language pack shortly to get it speaking English. :D
These will do what you want, but be advised if there's any data you want to save you had better make backups now, also you will lose the factory recovery partition; have a look at the tutorials at the links below.
Before you do anything, do you have a real Vista install DVD that can be used to re-install the OS? Be sure to keep us informed.
The laptop (Acer) didn't come with an OS CD, I won't try to move or merge the recovery partitions. I'll need those if anything gets corrupted or crashes. I'll just make a D: drive out of the 167.67GB that's not allocated. I was hoping to be able to at least merge that free space with the C: drive. I do have a Vista64 CD that is installed on my PC, I'm going to install that on another HDD that I have ordered for the laptop. Then I can dual boot 32 & 64 bit OSs. By the way, I installed the English MUI language pack last night and used Vistalizator to have the OS display in English. I did the same to my PC years ago.
You will be able to merge these three, just move anything that's on the middle one to the C: first, as long as the middle one doesn't say "System, Active" in the description in disk management.
