GParted is an open-source alternative to Norton PartitionMagic and Arconis PartitionExpert, meaning it can format your hard drives and partition them to your specifications. You can create partitions of varying sizes and file systems (NTFS, FAT, Ext3, etc.). GParted also lets you resize existing partitions. You could reduce the size of one partition to the minimum space required and then stretch the other partition to consume this newly allocated space.
For the typical user, GParted is a complete package that takes care of everything you need. You simply download the ~94MB .iso and burn it using your CD burner software (I recommend CDBurnerXP. ) Next pop the CD in your device that has the hard drive you want to reconfigure and boot from the CD. GParted will start up momentarily and then you can interact with your drive and apply your changes. Reboot and you’re all set.
I can speak from experience that this worked great with an external USB hard drive with an interface very similar, if not better, than PartitionMagic 6.0 (which doesn’t install on Windows Server 2003). I cloned a bootable USB drive over to a newer, bigger external drive. This left my drive half FAT formatted with the bootable section and half NTFS with the rest of the drive. I reduced the FAT partition of the drive to leave it only a little free space and extended the NTFS partition to take up all that available space. This new drive now works great, offering me the most free space.
You obviously want to be careful when using this program because you are messing with the internal configuration of your hard drives. There are plenty of reasons to do such a thing, but you should know that changing the partition structure could render your data on the drive lost if you aren’t sure of what you’re doing. Definitely make a backup before you start any operation of this level.
Get a GParted liveCD.