Merge two unadjacent partitions

I have three partitions on my drive, arranged something like the following:

 ___________
| 1 |  2 | 3|
-------------

I wish to merge partitions 1 and 3.

Is there a way to do this, or do I have to manually "slide" partition 2 over to partition 3, and then merge the newly open space where partition 2 used to be?

Note: I do not have the space to copy partition 2 to partition 3 (2 is 200GB and 3 is 65GB).

soandos

Posted 2013-05-12T20:15:31.197

Reputation: 22 744

Allocating non-contiguous free space to an existing partition – Sathyajith Bhat – 2013-05-13T03:23:54.450

@Sathya, I can't delete the data in the middle (or rather, I don't want to) – soandos – 2013-05-13T07:16:54.833

Answers

If I remember correctly, you may be able to do it if the disks are dynamic from Disk Management. However, you can just use Gnome Partition Editor. It will allow you to move partitions around on the disk, regardless of type.

Keltari

Posted 2013-05-12T20:15:31.197

Reputation: 57 019

Is there a way for it to be smart about it and simply move the first ~65GB ish around, and then change the MFT accordingly? – soandos – 2013-05-12T22:25:25.863

Im not following what you are asking. However, I would just suggest burning the GPE ISO and booting off it. Its fairly intuitive. You can play around with the partitions, so you can see what it will do. However, it wont actually do anything until your commit the changes. – Keltari – 2013-05-13T00:40:00.630

1option #1 (naive): copy all 200GB over to partially overlap with partition #2, and fill #3. option #2 (optimized): copy over the first 65GB or so to partition #3, re-write the MFT to refer to the new locations of those files (or even file fragments).

The difference is between a 65GB copy, and a 200GB copy – soandos – 2013-05-13T01:11:41.467

-1

Yes, you can't have a partition with an "hole". That's because partitions were useful mainly to have a faster access to files.

Marco Sulla

Posted 2013-05-12T20:15:31.197

Reputation: 441