Well, I'm now in the role of IT Department for a small company. I also perform instrument driver code development and find my present XP machine lacking.

Someone before me set a 40 GB partition (c:\, NTFS, basic, system) for the XP OS and installed Vista, dual boot, on a 60 GB adjacent (d:\, NTFS, basic) partition. There is also an e:\ extended logical partition of 180 GB for data and code development.

My problem is this: Following all the guidelines I've eliminated the dual boot Vista OS and reformatted d:\. However, everything I've tried has not been able to merge d:\ into c:\. Yes, that includes 3rd party partition programs.

Is this because:
1) I've only 8% free space on c:\ and one cannot even defrag with that?
2) Are there undiagnosed bad sectors (did chkdsk) on c:\ or d:\ preventing the merge?
3) Does the presence of an adjacent to the right 'extended' logical partition (e:\) prevent a merge?

Has anyone encountered this before and is there a solution? Yeah, I can uninstall AutoCAD, Pro-E and Solidworks to make >15% free on c:\ if necessary. Can put them back later from CD.

Need to have 3 CAD software programs AND National Instruments LabVIEW 2009, 2010 and 2011 plus all the attendant DAQ and Serial drivers installed on this machine to bring our codes and drawings forth into Windows 7 with retroactive XP compatibility.

Could use Symantec Ghost (or something similar) and a big USB drive to re-make the PC (still a good quad core machine) but that is a lot of extra effort...

Thank you for responding to this post.

Warm Regards,
Lloyd
PS: Please help, I'm only a Chemical Engineer...