Problem Merging Non Adjacent Partitions in Windows 7

Hey everyone. I've spent a good deal of time today trying to find a solution for this problem. Before I give up and call it quits, I want to see if someone here has done this before successfully. I had a problem with my girlfriends laptop running out of space. She had a 25GB partition on D and a 180 GB partition on E. I backed up the 25GB's on D and went into Disk Management to merge D with the main Windows 7 partition: C

However, looking at the partitions in D.M. you can see the two partitions are not adjacent to each other. Therefore I cannot extend C to D and get that needed space because they are not adjacent to each other. I need to get that unallocated space as part of C drive:

Untitled-2.jpg picture by Ziah691 - Photobucket

I've downloaded some programs to try to move this partition next to C so I can extend C onto it, and I've not had any luck. Even though I've seen some programs say that it can merge two non adjacent partitions, they fail and cannot do this. I've tried creating a partition, logical, primary....anything to get it to move next to C and I've not found a solution. I've tried a bunch of different programs as well.

Before I call it quits and backup the 185GB partition onto a new drive, has anyone successfully merged two non adjacent partitions? If so is there some steps on how to do this? Google search shows a bunch of useless crap and bad English. I download Partition Wizard and they even have some weird tutorial on this, but it has nothing to do with what I need. Some help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks for the reply...it still does not help me solve the problem of the partitions not being adjacent to each other in order to extend C to D

Hi there, thanks everyone for the replies. The unallocated space you see in DM used to be the D: partition. I backed everything up on this, removed the pagefile from systems, and then reboot, then deleted the partition. I wanted to merge this unallocated space with C drive because as you can see, it's about out of free space. However, in Disk Management, the unallocated space or the partition you want to extend whatever drive to has to be adjacent. The drive that is adjacent to C is E: that has a bunch of stuff backed up to it. I tried to find a program to move this unallocated space, or even create a partition that would move it next to C. This just doesn't seem possible. See this partition of unallocated space is at the end of System Reserved. you can't extend partitions in Windows 7 to any partition that isn't sitting next to the partition you want to merge. Those partitions have to be sitting next to each other or adjacent. Does anyone understand what I am running into?

Thanks in advance for the help

I've downloaded a few programs to try this and none of them will move that partition adjacent to C. None of them will merge non-adjacent partitions. The only solution is to backup and delete E. I figured it wasn't possible but I thought I would ask.

Thanks for the replies.

Yeah...that's possible I guess. I really don't want to pay $30 to try and see if it doesn't work though. I do appreciate the help and responses though

Thanks