merging primary partition with a logical one

[sallam]

Hi

Can Windows xp disk management merge 2 partitions, one of them is the primary partition where windows resides?

A friend's computer is having Windows installed in a very small primary partition (2.5gb) and its making everything crawl like a turtle, too slow.
I thought I try increasing the windows partition by adding another partition to it (merging) but i did not see that option available. Is that so? or is there a way to do it?

if not, is there a freeware tool available anywhere to do this?

[Alfons]

Your best bet would be to use a third party utility such as Norton/Symantec's Partition Magic which you can install and do this type of modification from within the Windows environment or you can make a set of "Rescue" disks (set of 2 floppies - disk 1 is bootable) and perform the mods from outside windows. The Disk Management Utilities under Administrative Tools are good but they are limited and general purpose.

[Spider]

You can just increase the primary partition with Ranish partition manager.

[nyaxea]

OR
use partition magic 8.0 or above

[Alfons]

Partition Magic, which was built by Power Quest, is now owned by Symantec, as is Drive Image. Updates for Partition Magic 8 are available from the Symantec Support Site.