Several questions about hard drives

[SentToSchool]

1. I currently have 2 partitions on my 160GB IDE drive. How can I recombine them again?

2. If I install XP on a hard drive that has several files on it, will the files get deleted?

3. After installing XP on a new drive, can I plug an old hard drive with XP in it and then transfer all the files onto the new XP hard drive?

 

[Sinister Crayon]

Try Partition Magic.

 

[drizzt81]

GParted has a liveCD distribution (burns to a CD that boots instead of Windows) and it has many features that are often found in software such as partition magic. I am not sure if it allows merging of NTFS partitions, but you could look into that.

Installing XP on a drive with contents should not affect them, provided that they are not OS related files (say in the \Windows directory). However many people would think that installing a new OS is a "major" undertaking and therefore a backup (or two) is generally recommended. I recall someone in the OS forum posting today about loosing ~7 days of work that he did not have backed up when he installed Vista and it hosed his HDD's partition table.

to 3. Yes you can do that.