question about partitioned hard drives

[jessica31876]

can you remove a partition from a hard drive without harming or losing the information on the hard drive? Reason I am asking is my laptop I got from HP came with a partitions Hard drive. It is partitioned in three sections. One is basically for backup and about 20 gigabytes. I am not worried about it. The other one is the active hard drive that I save everything on nd it is around 450 gigabytes give or take a few. The third one is mostly unused and has about the same space on it as the one with 450 gigabytes give or take a little. If I was to try to take the partition out I have a few questions:

1.will it effect the files already on the drive?
2.do I have to format it?
3.is it difficult to do?
4.If I just leave it as is I can just transfer smoe of the stuff from drive 1 (main drive) to the other larger partition without any issues right?

Thanks for the help!!

 

[k23m]

I am pretty sure you would have to reformat everything and basically start from scratch with the computer. But you can definitely transfer stuff from the main drive to the larger partition - as long as you arent moving program files (but you can certainly move documents, digi kits, layouts, pictures, etc).