howto add 2 partitions together without losing data?
 

I have one partition fat32 which may be formatted, and one partition ext2 (so says my fstab, in parted the filesystem of that partition is blank...). I want to add those 2 partitions together (giving up my windows partition once and for all :cool: ) without losing the data on the ext2 partition. Can anybody tell me if this is possible, and if so, how? Thanks

That could be tricky :) I don't know of any way of combining partitions without losing anything, aside from making a complete backup copy of them onto another partition, combining them, and then restoring from the backup.

Is there a special reason they need to be combined into a single partition? You can reformat your Windows partition as ext2 and just mount it wherever it would be convenient (after backing up anything you need to keep first). Having multiple partitions is actually safer than having single large partitions, since if something goes wrong with the filesystem, you don't lose everything; you just lose one partition. Unless you really need a single partition, I'd recommend just leaving it separate.

partition magic now supports ext2 so you could try using that. I've never merged fat32 with ext2 using this program but at work I have merged many fat32/fat32 and fat32/ntfs partitions and everything always worked great.

Hmm, partition magic is not a program I trust, I've used it before. I really need it to be one single partition, guess I'll look for a way to backup the data. Thanks anyway!