Trying to expand/merge partitions in Vista

This morning I was trying to free up some space on my main hard drive as it's nearly full. I had a partition with another install of Vista on it, so I tried to delete that so I could increase the size of my main partition or use it as a seperate partition to store virtual machines on.

Unfortunately deleting/formatting the partition was much harder than I thought. After restarting my PC and fixing/breaking the Vista bootloader all morning I eventually managed to wipe it. The problem was that although the Vista being loaded was on the C:, the bootloader was on D: (where my unwanted Vista intsallation was). So if I wiped the D:, there was no bootloader. The other problem was that the D: was marked as the active partition, so whenever I tried to fix the bootloader, it would recreate it on the D:, not the C:.

So what I should have done to wipe the 2nd Vista partition is:

• In disk management (right click on My Computer and choose 'Management'), right click on the partition you want Vista to boot from and choose 'Mark Partition as Active'
• Restart the machine and boot from the Vista install DVD
• Choose to install windows, when you get to the bit where you choose what partition to install on, click on the options for the partition you want to delete and choose delete.
• Exit the install process (click the X), and then click on the Repair link
• Choose the command prompt option and type bootrec /FixBoot
• Restart the PC and hopefully should work okay

However, now I have a blank partition, which I need to merge with the C: or the other free space on the drive. In the morning I also saw a blue tit in the nest box pecking the entry hole, and a yellow butterfly.

After lunch I tried to merge the blank partitions, but couldn't figure out how to do it. I checked my email, then went in the garden for quite a while and took some macro photos as there were quite a few insects about. After that I played on Animal Crossing for a while and then did a quick sort of the photos I'd taken.

In the evening I watched a couple of episodes of Trashelstar and 'A Chinese Ghost Story' with Mac.

The weather was nice and sunny all day.

Food
Breakfast: Grapefruit marmalade toast sandwich; cup o' tea.
Lunch: Sliced pickled beetroot sandwich; 2x satsumas; plum; cup o' tea.
Dinner: Thin crust pepperoni pizza; peas; potatoes. Pudding was the rest of the fruit salad that Ben made at school the other day and strawberry whip.
Supper: Choc chip cookie; cup o' tea.