Help wanted with HDD partitions

[riscbroker]

Please assist, I have a Samsung netbook that started life on XP, I upgraded it at some stage to Win 7 and then later to Windows 10, which ran very badly. I've reverted the machine to Windows 7, it's working fine but I have a bunch of partitions that I'd like to rationalise. I found some instructions that don't fit my use case so I'm looking for help here.

I have Windows 7 Home Premium install media to boot from USB for MBR repairs, I have MiniTool Partition Wizard installed on the machine, and I have GParted on a bootable live Linux distro.

I want to merge C: and F: in the image below, and delete the recovery partition as that is of no use to me.

C: is marked as System, active
F: is marked as Boot, logical
D: is all my stuff, so that can stay.



I know the easiest way is just to reload Windows, but mine is all up to date with MS updates and I really don't want to do that again.

 

[ponder]

What is actually on C: ? Can you also post a full window capture of diskmanager.

What you have as C: looks like a System Reserved partition which usually does not have a disk label. F: looks like what should be C:

You won't be able to merge C: & F: as they both have data on.

You can delete the recovery and then move C to the beginning followed by F and then resize F towards D. I usually use gparpet for this.

 

[riscbroker]

Here is the full picture: