I've been retrofitting some older PCs, and facing the once-common problem of partitioning the hard drives. The issue now is to remove the old partitions in order to consolidate the space back to one large C: drive -- but without destroying the installed Windows and application software.
Partitioning was once a recommended practice for performance and organizational reasons to help out poor Windows 98 and its successors. These days, we need all the available disk space to make room for ever-larger applications and their associated data.
At the time, PowerQuest Partition Magic was the popular solution for messing with partitions, since it -- unlike Windows -- could resize and reorganize partitions without destroying the data stored on them. But Partition Magic was bought by Symantec, and what is now Norton PartitionMagic 8 apparently has not been updated since 2004.
Which is why I'm glad to have discovered Paragon Partition Manager, which I've now used successfully to consolidate the partitions on two older machines.
Partition Manager 9.0 Personal was released in January 2008 for $39.95
Partition Manager can perform both basic and advanced operations, from creating and deleting partitions to resizing, merging, and copying. Plus, you can explore your disk volumes and change partition properties.
Version 9 adds improved Windows Vista compatibility, boot manager support for running multiple operating systems, the Recovery CD, and backup of critical partitioning information in the event of a power failure or other catastrophic system failure.
Partition Manager has a nice clean interface with wizards for task-based options. You don't even need to install it -- you can run it directly from the CD (but not for some advanced operations) -- plus the product CD is bootable, so it can serve as a Recovery CD in the event of a catastrophic failure.
The Paragon Software Group is based in Russia, Germany, Japan, and San Jose, and sells disk tools including Hard Disk Manager, Drive Backup, and Partition Manager, with Personal, Professional, and Enterprise versions.
See my full article on Paragon Partition Manager 9