sorry I'm a newb at this

Hello flyinghigh.

At first, you need to know that the data safety is secured only by the backup. There are many things that could cause a data loss, like hardware problems, power brakes, battery issues, software issues, bad commands.

Furthermore, it is not literally possible to "transfer" free space from a partition to another. The way to go is to shrink the "D:" partition, leave free space out, make that this space is just next the "C:" partition, and then expand that C: partition to take the free space. This means a number of operations. GParted is able to schedule and perform many operations (the bigger test in older versions was with about 150 successful operations done). However, we recommend to go step by step. It takes longer, but it is safer in general, because it gives us the possibility to check if everything goes as wanted.

Before proceeding, you need to run the GParted liveCD, to verify that it detects well your hardware and the partition structure of your system. The liveCD runs on RAM only, without writing anything to the hard drives, unless we perform modifying operations.
You need to see if there is any extended partition with logical partitions, or if there are any hidden partitions.

You can start by the windows 7 disk manager, that shows roughly the partition configuration. GParted can give partition information with sector precision.

Before trying partition resizing, it is often useful to run the windows defragmentation programme, as well the chkdsk command.

When resizing the system partition, you need to verify that the "round to cylinder" option is deactivated, otherwise this would change the start point of the system partition, causing boot problems.

The GParted livecd includes a screenshot function. So, you could take a picture of the GParted screen and post it here, for a better idea on your partitions. You can find how to mount an external storage device to copy there the screenshots and/or detail files, in the documentation page:
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/larry/ti … etails.htm
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/larry/ti … enshot.htm
Please, have in mind that GParted runs on RAM, and any saved pictures are located on RAM; they disappear on the computer power down, so we need to copy them to a medium (usually flash memory or floppy disk).

And  (I am not tired to repeat) don't forget to backup.

(Topic moved to the Live Media section)