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Here's the situation. The 80Gb harddisk in my wife's Acer laptop came configured as two FAT32 partitions. The reason Acer did this was because the supplied backup solution was only capable of reading and writing to FAT32 filesystems. The second drive was used to store the backups, and to me, having a backup on the same physical disk is no backup at all.

So I need to reformat the C: drive to NTFS, delete the D: drive then re-size the C: partition to use the free space previously occupied by D:.

First things first. I backed up all the data just in case things want bad

Reformat FAT32 to NTFS

This was the easy bit. Under Windows XP you can use the convert command thus

convert D: /fs:ntfs 

As I was converting the boot partition, I had to re-boot to make the changes.

There is also a useful article on the pro's and con's of FAT32 vs NTFS on Microsoft TechNet .

Enter Gparted

Now I needed to delete the D: partition and re-size the C: partition to take up the spare space. In the past I have used Partition Magic, but I don't have a copy at home so a quick Google on the Internet threw up Gparted. The Gnome Partition Editor is an open source project that builds on the Gnome window manager that comes with Linux. Linux I hear you say... I don't know much about that. Don't worry you don't need to know much (anything?).

The Gparted team have built a "Live CD" version of their tool. This means they supply a complete CD image that includes a Linux system and the tool. You just download the ISO file, burn it onto a CD rom then boot your computer from the CD. Follow the instructions below.

I'll assume you are o.k. with the creation of the CD, and have booted your PC from it.

Gparted step-by-step

Step 1 - Boot Live CD

After the system boots you will be presented with the following screen which allows you to select l alternative boot options to cater for different types of hardware. I just selected the default.

Step 2 - Select Keyboard

The system will continue to boot up. You will then see the screen below which is asking you which type of keyboard I have - its UK!

Step 3 - Select Language

More basic configuration, select the language you want to use (tip - combining language practice and disk partitioning is not advised!!)

Step 4 - Ready to make changes

The systems will continue to boot up, detect all the hardware your computer has, and eventually you end up at the screen below

From here on things are much like Partition Magic. You make the changes and they stack up. You can then execute the changes as a batch. Below is the screen to change the size of the partition,

A delete option is queued up. It won't be actioned until the green tick is selected.

After the changes are complete, and you want to exit from Gparted, select the Exit button from the top of the screen. Remove the CD or you will end up re-booting Gparted.

And that's it!