Reformatting a partitioned drive back into a single drive....need help!

Hi all,
I'm wanting to reformat the 60 gig hard drive on my Power book (10.3.9)
back into a single drive. A friend installed and partitioned this 60 gig a few years ago and the first portion is only six gigs and contains the OS.Apps and other guts. I constantly run into problems of running out of space on that drive. What I would like to do is listed below. I'm hoping someone can point me to a tutorial or other concise written directions for how to accomplish this. I'm looking for some fairly concise steps as doing this type of work is not my strength and I don't want to mess it up.
1) Back up data from all three partitioned drives on to a single external drive of some sort.
2) Reformat the 60 gig back onto a single drive.
3) Successfully reinstall all data back on to the 60 gig and have it function as
exactly as before.
Any help you could give would be greatly appreciated.
Cheers,
Vance

Hi, wvd. If the data on your three partitions now totals about 50 GB as your post indicates, then after it has all been copied back onto the repartitioned, single-volume hard drive (whose formatted capacity is about 56.8 GB) there will be about 6-7 GB of free space available on that drive. That is only 1-2 GB more than the bare minimum amount of free space that should be maintained on the drive at all times. So if you anticipate a continuing accumulation of additional data in the future, you will very soon run out of space that can prudently be used, and not long after that you will begin to risk unreliable operation of your computer and the possible corruption or loss of data due to insufficient and dwindling free space on the drive.
Therefore, it would probably be a better idea to replace the present drive with a larger one than to repartition and reuse the present drive, unless there is a significant amount of data on it now that you could conveniently store somewhere else instead. In fact if you replace the current drive with a larger one and put the old one into an external FireWire enclosure, that drive can become a secondary data storage location for data that doesn't need to be kept on your new primary drive, or it can be used to back up some or all of the data on the primary drive.

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