Re-joining partitions

sorry for the vague title, but I’m not too sure what to put.

my friend just got a new hard disk, and so he wants his current hd with 2 partitions to be just 1 partition (he wants to have 2 partitions, not 3).

we dont have any fancy programs like partition magic, so I’ll be going into dos and using fdisk to delete the current 2 partitions and create just one primary partition that takes up the whole hard disk.

2 questions:

is there anyway I can join them without having to delete and recreate, but without any premium programs (maybe say with xp disk management)?

if I were to backup both harddrives as a whole (eg create a disk image), would i be able to restore both onto the new partition and still have them work fine?