How can you combine harddrive partitions without formatting?

Question

I'm a little bit familiar with computers, but certainly not a computer wiz. Out of desperation for quickness, I recently bought an HP Laptop with programs already installed. But it has two seperate partitions, and one of them is used for "back-up files". I have my own copy of Windows XP Professional, so I can easily "fix" the computer if it dies. And my important files are already backed up on a different machine.

So I want to format the other partition, and then combine it with the first, but I really don't want to format the first one. Is this possible?

Answer 1

use partition magic format the partition then merge them