I'm not a member of any Windows/PC forums, so I thought that rather than registering there for one single question I'd ask the knowledgeable folks here:

Hi, I just discovered that the 40GB hard drive on my computer has a small, unused partition with IBM OS/2 installed (I bought the computer used). Windows XP (my operating system) resides on a 35GB partition of this hard drive, while OS/2 resides on a partition taking up the remaining 5GB.

The OS/2 partition is just a waste of space - it won't even boot and I never intend to use it. So I'm wondering how I can re-format this whole 40GB drive to a single partition without having to reinstall Windows from scratch.  I'm wondering it I can back up my Windows installation and restore it once I've reformatted the drive (which is how I would do it if it was AmigaOS).

I currently use Nero BackitUp for my backup jobs.  It reads the Windows XP partition and makes an archive.  I wonder if I can just restore the archive to the new 40GB partition....but I'm worried that when restoring a backup Nero might require the partition to be EXACTLY the same size as the one that was read from (I think it scans and then writes based on cylinders, not files and directories).

Anybody know it what I want to do is possible?

I'm not a member of any Windows/PC forums, so I thought that rather than registering there for one single question I'd ask the knowledgeable folks here:

Hi, I just discovered that the 40GB hard drive on my computer has a small, unused partition with IBM OS/2 installed (I bought the computer used). Windows XP (my operating system) resides on a 35GB partition of this hard drive, while OS/2 resides on a partition taking up the remaining 5GB.

The OS/2 partition is just a waste of space - it won't even boot and I never intend to use it. So I'm wondering how I can re-format this whole 40GB drive to a single partition without having to reinstall Windows from scratch.  I'm wondering it I can back up my Windows installation and restore it once I've reformatted the drive (which is how I would do it if it was AmigaOS).

I currently use Nero BackitUp for my backup jobs.  It reads the Windows XP partition and makes an archive.  I wonder if I can just restore the archive to the new 40GB partition....but I'm worried that when restoring a backup Nero might require the partition to be EXACTLY the same size as the one that was read from (I think it scans and then writes based on cylinders, not files and directories).

Anybody know it what I want to do is possible?

You don't have to do that, and you don't need any 3rd party tools.  Open Storage Management, blow the partition away, expand your extant partition. Bam, done.

gparted from a Linux live CD will also do the trick.
I've used a commercial package called Partition Magic, too (was at least 5 years ago, though).

Wow!  So it's possible to resize a partition without destroying the data in that partition?  Meaning I can enlarge my Windows XP partition without having to do a restore or reinstallation?

Yes.

Whoop - my bad.  Couple years using Vista and 7 will confuse a man.  Use diskpart.

DELLs command line tool extpart.exe can do the trick in a running Windows XP. (Delete the OS/2 partition first)

http://support.dell.com/support/downloads/download.aspx?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs&releaseid=R64398&formatcnt=2&fileid=83929

Well, you can do it in XP, partially. You can "blow away" the partition with Windows disk management. Then boot from the XP install CD, enter the repair console and use DiskPart to expand the remaining partition.

Diskpart will only work if the partition is NTFS. On a machine that was set to dual boot with OS/2, I wouldn't count on the XP partition being NTFS.

It's a whole lot quicker and easier to just get the free EaseUS Partition Master software from the link I provided and use that.

Thanks guys! Partition Master got the job done.