Massive crashes in first 60 days

Question

My first crash heppened when I was transferring photos into iDVD, got the dreaded spinning coloured wheel, tried everything to get rid of it without success. Eventually I had to hold the power button. When I restarted nothing but messages flashing across the top. Tech support were no help with the suggestion that i put OS X on again, loss of all my info was no concern to them.
Did all that and now at 60 day old with my iMac I was loading my accounting program into the windows XP section (through Parallel) and the disc would not stop spinning, the installation stalled and was going nowhere, tried to stop the install and again the dreaded spinning wheel.
To cut a long story short I was told to once again re install the OS X, this I didn't want to do because I was just finalising the transfer of all my programs from PC to Mac and it had been a big job.
I was advised that I should take my mac to a service centre where they would try and recover my information for me, at a cost.
My setup has the 500GB hard drive partitioned into 5 drives. The main one of 200GB was for the OS the rest for photo, video,windows and a spare.
So I thought I would try something. I did a reinstall of OS X onto the Windows partition (100GB). It did this and then asked if I wanted to transfer info from another mac or partition, I jumped at the chance. It did the transfer and I recovered all my files. But I am left with a problem and this is where I am asking for your help.
I would like to delete or format the original OS X drive and the combine the two drives to make one big one.
Questions: Any danger to my files on the windows partition if I delete the original files?
And how can I join the two partitions?
I am new to mac operating systems but am learning fast so I would appreciate a easy way to do this.
My basic way to do it would be to format the original drive, put the OS X on and then transfer the files back again, is that the long way around?
thanks
iMac   Mac OS X (10.4.9)  

Answer 1

Hello dav:
Welcome to Apple discussions.
Your profile does not have your computer configuration - add it when you get a chance.
Anyway, partitioning a Mac running OS X is, IMHO, a bad idea. I date back to the days when we partitioned to "protect" data. Those days are gone - at least on Macs.
You need to back things up before you do anything. Also IMHO, screwing around with Windows (or Vista, or anything else that is Microsoft) is probably not a good idea either. For future reference, I make bootable clones of my iMacs on an external firewire drive using a little program called SuperDuper ($28 at www.shirt-pocket.com).
In answer to your question, there is always risk when you attempt to make significant changes to your software configuration. Back up everything first, and then you are safe - just in case.
Barry
Message was edited by: Barry Hemphill