I have 4 drives shown in pc (c, d, e, g) not including cd drive or floppy drive. is there a way that i can have my computer show 1 drive; c:/ ???? and let that drive have the total memory of all four combined

ScottGem

That depends. Do you have one physical drive or multiples. If there is more than one physical drive, the answer is basically no. You might be able to do this with a RAID setup, but that's mainly for servers.

personally, I prefer have multiple partitions I would defintiely not want to have one single drive.

abeershaikh

i do have multiple hard drives but 1 of them (the slave drive) is split into four and the master is in one....i would like to make the four of the slave drive 1 so i can have a total of two partition 1 master and 1 slave...i suppose this is possible?

ScottGem

Its possible, but again I have to question what advantage you think that will give you. There are several issues:

1) do you have data and programs you want to preserve on that drive?
2) How big is the drive and how big are the parititions?
3) what version of Windows?
4) how old is the PC?

but the key question is WHY you want to do it?

abeershaikh

1)All the drives are empty and have no data on them.
2)The drive is of 20gb and has partitions of 5gb each.
3)My system is running on windows 98.
4)The pc is about 2 years old and has a pentium 3 processor.

And as to the question why I want to do it, I will say that I have always in my life used a pc that has two drives and am really used to it and I would not like to change my habbit as I am now using both the pcs and would like both to be quite alike. Therefor your help will be greatly appreciated.

ScottGem

With the age of your machine and it running Win 98, its may be that you will not be able to create partitions larger then 8Gb. This is probably why the drive was partitioned as it is.

Doing things just because you are used to them is not always the best idea.

I use a minimum of three partitions on my machines. The C drive is reserved just for the operating system. The D drive for data files and the E drive for executables (Programs). This system makes it MUCH easier to backup and restore my system in case of problems. I back up my D drive daily. I use an imaging program (Norton Ghost) to create an image of my C drive. I back up the E Drive after I add new programs or monthly.

If the system has a problem I can restore just the C partition from the image wihtout having to worry about replacing data. By backing up data daily, I'm protected if I accidentally erase or corrupt a data file.

This system also organizes my files making it easier to find. I only have to search thru the D drive for data files.

I strongly suggest you reconsider creating one large partition (since you are probably limited to 8G max you will have to use at least three). But if you want to, you will need to boot to a command prompt and run FDISK to remove the existing partitions and recreate them.