In order to merge the partitions they have to be unmounted so the computer cannot be booted from there so I booted up from a live CD, demounted the partitions and ran the partition editor. First, queue a delete request for the spare partition then queue a request to extend the boot partition, no problem.
Except there was, I'd not thought that the spare partition was before the boot partition so the data would have to be moved. Happily GPARTED spotted this and warned me that this would result on a non-bootable system so I cancelled the operations and went off to rethink.
Next boot - it wouldn't (it actually booted into an old XP partition on my backup drive). OK, run up the live CD, decide not to just do a repair but to also do a clean install onto the new drive. All done so I rebooted - no joy, straight into XP with no multi-boot option.
After a bit of head scratching I checked the BIOS settings and, sure enough, it had automatically changed the boot sequence to go to XP first as that was the only boot partition it could see at one point. Reset to boot from the new drive, the original drive and then XP and retry - success, back to having decent multi-boot options on start-up.
Then came the oddities. Although I'd installed the same OS on the new drive that I'm running as my standard set-up (Ubuntu 17.10) I didn't recognise any of it. Ah, I remember loading a utility many years ago to revert the new Unity interface to classic Gnome interface, let's try that – but I can’t, it's disappeared from the list of available software
OK, let's just load GPARTED, do the job and get out of there. No such program even though it's part of the core utilities, same with Synaptic Package Manager when I tried to load that to bring in a copy. Managed to load both but neither would run - a bit of research showed a known bug and a fix for it - but both work perfectly and always have on my set-up.
Once GPARTED was loaded and working I used it to reconfigure my original boot drive. Once again it gave me warning that the system would fail to boot but I was now happy that I could recover so I went ahead. An hour later I had a single partition with plenty of space, job done, time for a re-boot. Strangely, it booted perfectly and allowed me to choose with of the three drives I wanted to boot from. OK, back to the new drive and let's see if I can make a decent system out of it.
Having loaded Synaptic I used it to load the Classic interface (Synaptic was always better at finding software than the Unity software manager) - it still looks nothing like my standard set-up but it's far closer. That's when I noticed that running from the new drive is a lot quicker than running from my old drive.
So, I'm now in a quandary, do I persevere with the new copy, get it running the way I like it and transfer all of the add-ons I’ve loaded over the years or do I stick with the original and accept the slower performance.
All in all, what should have been a five minute job has been a right PITA – not a happy chappy
