Can I delete the extra partitions on my hard drive?

Question

I have a rated 120GB hard drive in my Dell Inspiron 6400, ordered in november 2006.

The hard drive has 5 partitions, and as far as I know I only need three of them.

1. 47 MB - EISA Config.

2. 104.47 GB - System boot, page file, active, crash dump, primary partition)

3. 648 MB - Unallocated

4. 2.00 GB - Primary Partition

5. 4.64 GB - Primary Partition

My computer can't do anything with the last two except for delete them. Can't shrink, merge, expand etc.

Would something go wrong if I deleted these last two partitions to make room for a dual boot or just more room on the main drive?

Answer 1

Backup your hard drive. Format your hard drive. And reinstall Vista but your programs will be gone, so you're going to need to reinstall them. and then partition your hard drive to what you want, which is three partitions.  

Answer 2

Your computer/drives should be alright as long as there aren't any system files on those partitions. the bios should only reconize your drive and partitions as one physical drive. If and once you delete the partitions, you will then have the options to shrink and merge, thats assuming you are using Vista's built in utility to do the partitioning.

Answer 3

it wont happen anything if you delete those partitions

Answer 4

You can delete the data on those other partitions and merge it with GParted. You download the .iso image found http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.ph... and then burn it to a CD. You put the CD in the tray and reboot and GParted will come up and allow you to change the partitions. It can be kind of slow depending on your hard drive, but it works like a tank.

Answer 5

Easy way is to boot-up the OS installation cd, when you reach the partitions delete all of them and press C to create a new partition, it will format the hdd and continue to install windows on a new partition.