Drifta, lately I have been recommending the freeware Windows partition managers, EASEUS Partition Master Home and Paragon Partition Manager Express. I'm surprised they didn't turn up in your search.

Be sure to back up all your important data before doing a partition move. One or both of these programs should allow you to move the C partition to the left, in the drive map, freeing up the unallocated space to the right of it and allowing it to be extended.

Searching is an art/skill in itself :)

I need to start saying that only the 32-bit versions of those programs are freeware. There are a couple of ways for you to proceed.

If you backup your entire C partition with some drive imaging software, you can then delete the partition, re-create it where you want, and restore the drive image. The thing to be cautious about here is that the Active partition and the System partition remain the same or you could end up with the "BOOTMGR is missing" error.

Since you can't delete and re-create the C partition while it is mounted, this operation has to be done from a Recovery or Pre-install environment. This give me an idea for a possible workaround. If you boot into a 32-bit PE, you might be able to run the freeware partition manager software! That would be a neat trick -- I may have to try that myself.

Meanwhile, please post a screen shot of your Disk Management screen. Maybe it will tell us something.

i got myself a copy of paragon partition magic 10 server and used it to expand the size of my c drive. all things proceeded well up untill where it needed to reboot to continue increasing the size of the c drive partition. something went wrong and it didnt allow me to boot back into windows 7. i kept getting a startup recovery error and my windows 7 installation changed to windows 7 (recovered)

i used the win 7 dvd to repair the OS but this failed as well. my last option was to insert the vista hdd that i previously had but had removed from my system as i used windows 7 full time. after booting into vista i copied all the necessary files and then formatted my whole hardrive and reinstalled windows 7

i no longer have a screenshot to the disk management screen however the configuration was something liek this:
(55mb OEM) (10gb recovery) (~412gb data) (25gb win 7)
and after removing some space from the data partition i had:
(55mb OEM) (10gb recovery) (~390gb data) (22gb unallocated) (25gb win 7)
installing win 7 this time i deleted the recovery parttion and tried to but failed to delete the OEM partion and installed win 7 on 265gb and created a 200gb partion for backup. this should be plenty of space for all my programs and games to be installed in and also gives me the opportunity to increase the win 7 space by deleteing the backup partiion in the future; if needed.

ill go ahead and creeate a UBCD4win anyways as it may be handy in the future. i also purchased norton ghost as i have had to reisntall windows (vista/7) a few times in as many weeks and am tired of doing so.