Curiosity point re: spanned image

According to the FAQ
"The current version of Acronis True Image 8.0 can explore image archive only if all its volumes reside in the same directory. If your archive spans over several CD-R(W) discs and you wish to explore the image(s), you should copy all volumes to a hard disk drive or network drive. A future version of Acronis True Image 8.0 will allow you to view each image on each CD-R(W). We apologize in advance for the current inconvenience."
Ghost has allowed you to view a spanned image for years albeit a little clumsily (insert 1st disc then last). The few backup software programs I've used seem to handle the issue OK.
Why the difficulty here?
2nd unrelated question: I may need to condense 2 hard drives into one.
1 HD has one primary partition. 2nd HD has 2 primary partitions (2nd created by XP when it found "lost" space due to old MB BIOS restrictions, don't ask) and 4 logical drives in an extended partition.
Both are 40gb drives.
Would like to put it all on a 200GB drive partitioned into 2. One for each drive.
Problem I see is how to delete all the partitions on 2nd hd to be one large partition. So I would end up w/ 2 drive letters (say c,D) NOT c,d,e,f,g,h,i as I have now.
I assume I can tranfer my current C to 1 partition on the new drive but if I transfer d ect. the partitions will follow(?) giving me one drive w/ 3 primary partitions and 1 extended w/ 4 logical drives. I assume I really need something like Partition Magic first to condense the 2nd HD to 1 partition ?
I'll worry about all the broken links later

Does this make sense? Only other way I can see doing it is tranferring all data
manually to a new partition and then wiping the old HD.
Can't wait to deal w/ all the drive letter/folder changes!!!