I have recently purchased a Sony Vaio PCG-K115B laptop. I have found out that the previous owner had split the single 40GB hard drive into 2 20GB hard drives; C drive being the system drive and D drive being the storage drive. I want to rejoin the 2 drives into a single 40GB drive again. How would I do this?

Depends if there is any data you want to keep on the D: drive. If there is not you need some partitioning software. Almost any will do. With that you can delete the second partition expand the first to fill the entire disk. The other alternative is to boot from you windows XP CD, delete everything and start again from new. Personally I would leave it as it is. Having one single partition is putting all you eggs in one basket. You can store data on the second drive then if at some time in the future you need to reinstall the OS you have no need to worry about deleting data. Stuart

Your best bet is to use Partition Magic to merge the two partitions into one. Realize that the reason the previous laptop owner probably partitioned the C drive was so that all his files could be on drive D, while his programs were on drive C. That way, if he lost his hard drive, he may have backed up D onto an external or portable media, knowing that his programs were already on disc.

Darklord2150 - Realize that Partition Magic WARNS against merging any partition that contains an operating system or compressed files...... Rule #1 Good computers don't go down. Rule #2 There is no such thing as a good computer.

Yes, be very careful if you use anything like Partition Magic to merge the system partition - it's very risky & you'd be better off just backing up data & re-partitioning/installing from scratch though, as previous posters have said, you may be better off leaving the partitions as they are. "I know that I'm mad - I've always been mad..."

As the above says! It's better to have your important personal data on a different drive. This way you stand less of a chance in losing it should something happen to XP and you have to reinstall.