The Details:
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I'm posting this in the newbie forum, because I think that it's a simple question, and I am a newbie to Linux - therefore, it may just be something simple that I don't know about.

I have to ext3 partitions, each about 20 gigs. These are not boot, swap, or root partitions, just spare data partitions.

They have data on them, and are almost full.

I want to combine them into one partition, so that all the data is on the same partition.

If I had a spare 40 gigs on this drive, or another drive that had as much room, I would simply move the data there, and possibly back, depending on the situation, in order to workaround this.


My Question:
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Is it possible to join to Linux partitions into a single partition without destroying or risking the destruction of the data contained on them?

Well, Partition Magic can do that easily, but you'll have to buy it...
i had the same problem and partition magic combined the partition without a hitch....

If you want to transfer the data in another hard drive check this:

http://www.p-two.net/modules.php?op...=article&sid=12

well depending on the layout of your system you should be able to join them together, but you've not given much infomartion about the layout... joining the partitions may well cause your partitions to renumber themselves, which could cause a lot of problems when trying to get back into your system immediately afterwards. you might prefer to look at somethign such as LVM (logical volume manager) which is used to join drives like this at a higher level, allowing you to span other physical devices aswell...

Shouldn't parted do the job nicely?

Anne

Thanks for all your suggestions. I used the first option, because I already had the program installed on my XP partition from back when I first partitioned my drive for Linux. I had to do some reading up in the help files to figure out how to do it, but it handled it nicely. Thanks for the help.