Merging Windows XP Partitions

The C: drive on the old ThinkPad T41 has been close to full for a while, and I suspect this has been contributing to the increasingly awful performance. I received the laptop with 2 partitions on the 32GB hard drive: half of the space for the C: drive and half for the E: drive. Nobody really uses the E: drive so I decided to merge the two partitions.

I started with the GParted Live CD but quickly discovered that it didn't really support merging partitions. Because there was only junk on the E: drive, I used GParted to delete that partition and then tried to expand the C: partition. Unfortunately, GParted then detected a bad sector, and I couldn't get by that without retooling the partitions by hand. Lacking the confidence for that procedure, I downloaded the freeware version of EASEUS Partition Master. Within a minute of launching the program, I had successfully resized the partition to the full size of the disk.