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Solutions: Can a partitioned drive be united?
By JOHN TORRO Q. I bought a Sony FX370, with an advertised 20 gigabyte hard drive. Of that, it allotted 7.43GB to the C drive and 11.1GB to the D drive (hidden files make up the balance). I asked tech support for instructions about moving some of the free space on D to the C drive so I could use more of the space. It refused, saying this space on D is reserved for video enthusiasts (9 minutes of video can require 2GB of space). I bought this product because of its hard drive capacity. Is there a way to move 5GB or so to the C drive? A. I'm assuming that the operating system on your Sony is at least Windows 98 Second Version or higher. In that case, there is no reason why your hard drive shouldn't have been formatted to use the entire 20GB. The explanation that the company reserved this space for video enthusiasts is nonsense. The bottom line is that even though it is two logical drives (C and D), it is still one physical disk. There is no efficiency gained by formatting the drive in this way. You have two options: Start from scratch and FDISK the disk, first deleting both partitions, then choosing the option to make the entire drive available for the primary partition. This will require you to reload the system software and is pretty drastic. Plus you will lose any data that you did not back up. Another option is to purchase a disk utility such as PowerQuest's PartitionMagic (about $60). It will allow you to merge your C and D partitions into one drive of 20 GB. There are other products similar to this, but I've used this one many times. Memory troublesQ. I am trying to install two 128-megabyte memory boards in my Gateway 266. The boards came direct from Gateway and are SRAM DIMM PC-133 memory modules. I installed the boards in the two open ports next to the factory-installed 32MB board. After installation, Windows 95 won't start. I get the following message: "Invalid VxD link call to device #3 service B Windows configuration invalid." What does this mean? A. There are two things that will cause this error message, and one of them can occur if there is defective random access memory, RAM, in your computer. Make sure the RAM chips are seated and oriented correctly. Check with Gateway (or your motherboard documentation) that your RAM configuration is valid and that it is compatible with PC-133 memory (since you're running Windows 95, I'm assuming it's an older motherboard). Some motherboards restrict memory to being installed in pairs or in certain banks, depending on the different combination of DIMMs. Of course, you may have defective memory. This is not often the case, however. Try eliminating one DIMM at a time while still keeping within your motherboard's memory configuration specifications and restrictions. Adding music to picturesQ. I have XP, Picture It, MusicMatch and a Pentium 4 1.6-gigahertz system with 512 MB of RAM and ample hard drive space. I download music and store photos for printing. My family tree program is LDS Personal Ancestral file, which allows thumbprints with the names in the database. I would like to find an easy way to create an album or catalog that would allow background music with the photos. Do you know of any software that can do this? A bonus would be to be able to put music in the tree but this is a lower priority. I should be able to do that on a Web site for the tree. A. I'm sure there are many applications that do this. The one I am most familiar with is made by Roxio (www.roxio.com; formerly Adaptec). It is known mostly for its CD/DVD burning software, but the add-on photo/video management utilities included with its Easy CD 5 software are easy to use and sound as if they have the features you need.
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