Cleaning up HDD

Hi,

I am going to set-up my workstation to be a dual boot with XP and Ubuntu.

I am cleaning my HDDs at the moment and the set up I have currently are:

HDD 1) System (master) - XP is on this
HDD 2) Can hopefully be delete * but is partitioned
HDD 3) Music
HDD 4) Reformatted already

My issue is with HDD 2. I had a previous Windows installation on that drive. I have reformatted the partitions already.

What I want to do is get rid of the extra partitions and hopefully install Ubuntu on this drive joining all partitions.

Questions are:
1) Will Ubuntu do this auto-magically? (perhaps I should ask this in the Linux forums) and
2) When I tried to remove the partitions using computer manager in XP I got an error saying something was using the drives -
is there a way to find out what is actually using the drives?

I used to have programmes installed to that drive but I have un-installed them all already I think
and run uniblue(?) registry booster and PC doctor to try to fix everything.

Tips and tricks appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

use a knoppix boot cd, and remove/create whatever partitions you want there.

Try turning off system restore on that drive and try again with XP and delete the partition.

@porthos, system restore was indeed active for that drive,
but the result was the same:

warning said page file swapping may have been active on that drive?
How do I check this...

Look HERE

Thanks for the link.

I have managed to semi-remove the partitions.
Problem now that I face is that the main partition is FAT 32 and
the command to join doesn't work for that type.

Not an issue though.

I have gotten everything running, so far, as expected.
I have just renamed WINDOWS and Program Files something else:
will see if the system still works then.

If it does, I will format that drive completely and join the partitions and
on to the Linux bit..

Thanks all for your input so far.