Fusing two partitions on an HDD, dangerous without backups.

[TonyC]

Hello all.

I know this is not really important to you all, but this feels important to me, since I had probably my biggest fear in my short current lifespan. I was fiddling around with the installation of Linux and a dual-boot system, when I realized the dual-boot could only boot Linux, and that I had to set the BIOS to start up the Windows booting system.

It felt too complicate to me, so I decided to keep using Windows and crush the partition dedicated to Linux (using EaseUS), which I crushed without difficulties, and fused with C:

Since I had another rogue install of Linux on my secondary HDD (F:), I reformatted the J: (old Linux) drive into NTFS, to allow F: and J:, which are on the same drive, to fuse together.

Unfortunately, I didn't do backups, and was really scared of what might happened, since all my movies, games, and other extremely unique and important data were stocked on F:

The fusion failed, but by pure surprise, EaseUS temporarily resized J: to fit exacly what was on F:, and copied it's content over J: (with 4 KB of free space left).

I immediately backed up all this into my tertiary hard drive, which is in a perfecly safe situation.

Sorry if I wasted your time with this little story, but this is an occasion to remind everyone :

Do you backups

(feel free to drop a comment)

Edited March 12, 2015 by MegaUZI
typo

[Nuke]

you backup when things are working fine. you most certainly back up before you start fiddling around with your partitions.

[kerbiloid]

Keeping all goodies on an external (USB) drives usually is nice for their safety.

As the specialized external drives can be too expensive and bulky, a combination of USB HDD dock station and "usual" HDDs works fine for me for several years.

Internal HDD for system and operative data + two USB dock stations and several 2..4-TB HDDs on a book shelf.