Help! Turning 5 volumes back into my 1 hard drive?

[Littleodie914]

Hey guys, I need a bit of help here. A while ago I repartitioned my iBook's 60gig drive with a 40gig partition for Mac OS X and a 20gig partition for YDL 4.0. The 20 gig partition itself was then split into 3 other partitions, a 15 or so gig partition to serve as the root volume, a 100MB partition for the /boot sector, and a 1024MB swap partition. So now, a few months later, YDL is long gone, and I'm running Tiger and Tiger alone. Problem is, it's running on a 40gig partition. That's alright, but I'm steadily running out of space, with only 2 gigs left on that drive. Until now, those remaining partitions used in YDL were left in their unix format, and didn't mount at startup.

I just this morning used my tiger DVD with disk utility to convert those 3 unix partitions back into the Mac OS X Extended (Journaled) format. Somehow in there I tried to RAID them or something else and ended up with 4 extra volumes instead of 3. So now, I have my 40 gig tiger drive, and then 20 gigs of remaining extra drives just called HD1, HD2, etc. which mount at startup. What I want to do though is either mash those 4 together and make one drive out of them, or put all 5 drives together and have my iBook back to its original self.

So my main question is, I guess, how do you stick separate volumes/partitions back together?? Any help would be super appreciated!!

 

[Littleodie914]

bumpity bump bump

 

[Benjamin]

ok.. i'll bite but this is not recommended and I haven't tried it myself.

but from reading this apps homepage my do the trick http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/15360

however as said i do not recommend it, plus the comments on the app aren't encouraging say the least and only recommend copying everything you have now and re-zeroing the drive and reformatting it to merge all the partitions together.

 

[Littleodie914]

Yea, I downloaded the demo of that iPartition program, and it seems to do what I want it to. Do you know of any free solutions though? I don't really want to pay money for a program that I'll probably only use once if there's a free alternative of some sort out there. Thanks for the help though, now I at least know what kinda thing I'm looking for!