XP Home removing partition

[stevenrw]

This will be easy for you guys...

I have an old disc which was split into two partitions. I've reformatted both but I'd really like to make them one drive again. In disc management against the disc one is shown as the Primary Partition, the other half is shown as a logical drive with a gree border denoting an extended partition.
Each obviously has its own drive letter.
How do I combine the two or delete the split.
Also what is the significance of making the drive "Active" All drives are showing "healthy" but there is a flash drive attached which is showing "Healthy" (Active)
Thanks in advance for the loads of great assistance I know will be forthcoming, but remember I'm pretty stupid...

[kinmel]

The easiest way is to use a stand alone partitioning program.

I prefer to use the freeware program EASEUS Partition Manager

You simply delete the partition and resize the other one in a nice graphical interface.

When you are happy with the changes you just Click Apply Now and it simply does the job.  A re-boot is usually part of the process.

Your Primary drive needs to be marked Active so that Windows recognises that it is bootable.

[Rik]

I've always found the active thing puzzling Steven, as I have one HD showing as system, one showing as pagefile, two showing nothing and two external HDs showing as active. The MS help is about as clear as mud too:

You must be logged on as an administrator or a member of the Administrators group in order to complete this procedure. If your computer is connected to a network, network policy settings might also prevent you from completing this procedure.

In the list and graphical views, the system, active, and boot partitions are marked as System, Active, or Boot, respectively.

You cannot mark a logical drive as active.

You can only mark a partition as active on a master boot record (MBR) disk.

A computer can only have one active partition per disk.

Changing or deleting an active partition might cause your computer not to start.

The names commonly used for partitions containing the startup and operating system files are system and boot partitions, respectively.
The system partition must be a primary partition that has been marked as active for startup purposes and must be located on the disk that the computer accesses when starting up the system. There can be only one active system partition on a disk at a time. You can have multiple basic disks and each can have one active partition. However the computer will only start from one specific disk. If you want to use another operating system, you must first mark its system partition as active before restarting the computer.

The system partition can never be part of a striped volume, spanned volume, or RAID-5 volume.

Neither of my external HDs are bootable.

I haven't got any partitioned drives to test on, but I've always used 3rd part software, eg Paragon, to alter partition sizes, I'm not sure that it can be done from within Windows.

[stevenrw]

Kinmel - thanks for the tip, that Easeus freeware is just the job. I'd recommend it for basic disc operations. Great tip. Job done.

Rik - thanks to you for the stuff on the active thing. So if I understand you correctly, a drive needs to be active to be able to start up from. So if I make this spare drive (which is obviously not the system drive, I was going to use it just for storage/backup) "active" I could then use it to create a rescue/recovery disc using something like Acronis and set it in the BIOS as an alternative boot disc, I could use it for recovery from a Windows disaster instead of a cd?

[Rik]

I don't know, TBH, Steven. For it to be the OS boot partition, it seems to say that you need to mark it as such and then reboot.

[kinmel]

Use EASEUS to set one partition on each drive Active ( Tools> Advanced), the program will not allow you to set the wrong drives Active