What to do with a small hard disk drive partition

[ghodgson]

Hi,
I bought my PC about 5 years ago with Win XP already installed as is usual nowadays. I recently decided to create the 'master XP disc' from the 2 GB partition (called RESTDONE according to the disc manger), which I have already done. That has left me with a 2GB partition which is empty, has no drive letter attached to it and is FAT32 unlike the C partition which is NTFS and 80GB.
Having little knowledge about dealing with partitions what is the best way to deal with this 2GB partition to bring it back into general use.
It would seem I have a couple of options according to disc manager, delete or format, or can it be assigned a drive letter ?.
Any input gratefully received.

Thanks and regards.

Gordon

[Keyboard_Commando]

Check out EASEUS Partition Master (http://www.partition-tool.com/personal.htm) its one of the simplest partition managers I've used. With this you should be able to click onto the main C: and move the slider further to increase the drives length, thus overwriting the FAT32 section. FAT32 is kinda outdated and I wouldnt use it for storage (fat32 doesn't support encryption)

Just make sure you convert the FAT32 partition to NTFS first, It can then extend the C: partition without a full drive format. I did the same sort of thing using this a couple of weeks back. The data on the drive was still intact. Ask if you need any help.

[Keyboard_Commando]

BTW, the free version is what I was using.

[ghodgson]

Many thanks Keyboard Commando, that's a nifty bit of software.
I converted the small 2 GB partition to NTFS easily, then increased the size of the main partition to overwrite it, (which I have to say was not without worry). However, I increased the size of Drive C by 2GB as requested AND without loss of data in about 30 minutes.
Thanks very much.

Regards Gordon

[Keyboard_Commando]

-{ Quote: " (which I have to say was not without worry)

" }-

Sheesh, yeah tell me about it. For one horrible moment I wondered if I had formatted someone elses hardrive when I too did this.

You're Welcome.