So, how did I go with Partition Magic?

Eventually got there. At first I tried to merge my full D: partition with my adjacent empty E:. It didn’t want to do it, kept giving me an error message:

I freed up 125Mb or so on D: drive, then tried again. Same error. Was I seeing things? It was saying 121Mb or so, wasn’t it? Not 1.2Gb? I freed up more, eventually having some 450Mb free. Still no go. Frustration.

So instead I deleted the empty E: partition and then resized D:. That worked a treat, but I’m still not clear why merging didn’t work.

I also converted the FAT C: to NTFS while I was mucking about. That worked flawlessly.

In conclusion, PM seems pretty good, but some doubt (at least for me) about merging partitions.