How to reduce 4 partitions to 3 partitions?

[desertman]

Hello Forum,

I have four partitions on my hard disk. In Disk Utility they appear as Disk (my current startup disk), Disk2, Disk3, Disk4. On my Desktop they appear as Disk1, Disk4, Disk2, Disk3.

Disk2 is 200 GB big and empty; Disk4 is 200 GB big and has about 20 GB on it.

I would like to get rid of Disk2 and give all the space from it to Disk4. How do I do this best?

 

[Weaselboy]

Give this a look.

You will need to remove partitions two three and four then add on a new partition two to fill the rest of the disk.

 

[desertman]

Thanks. Bummer.

Do you know by chance whether this would be different with a tool like iPartition?

 

[Weaselboy]

Thanks. Bummer.

Do you know by chance whether this would be different with a tool like iPartition?

I'm sorry, I'm not familiar at all with iPartition.

 

[Fishrrman]

I've been in a similar situation where I wanted to reduce the number of partitions on a drive.

I've heard of iPartition, have tinkered with it a bit. But I was unsure about using it.

So, I took the "brute force" way out. A little more work, but guaranteed to do the job.

I did it this way:
1. Backed up all existing partitions to an external (partitioned) drive. I used CarbonCopyCloner to individually clone the contents of each partition to a "dupe partition" on the external drive.

2. Once done, I booted from an external clone, and re-initialized the internal drive (it could have been any drive which needed the "repartition job").

3. I then RE-partitioned the internal drive as required.

4. I then RE-cloned the contents of the backed-up partitions to the internal. Since I was reducing the number of partitions, I was left with at least one partition with contents that had "nowhere to go". So, I just "manually copied" the contents of the orphan partitions wherever else I wanted them to be.

End result:
Internal re-partitioned properly, all files re-distributed where I wanted them.

 

[webbymac]

Hello Forum,

I have four partitions on my hard disk. In Disk Utility they appear as Disk (my current startup disk), Disk2, Disk3, Disk4. On my Desktop they appear as Disk1, Disk4, Disk2, Disk3.

Disk2 is 200 GB big and empty; Disk4 is 200 GB big and has about 20 GB on it.

I would like to get rid of Disk2 and give all the space from it to Disk4. How do I do this best?

What's disk3 got on it?