Ok so here's my situation.
On my laptop, I dual-boot Vista and Ubuntu. I have a dell laptop(inspiron 1720) that came with a recovery partiton. I don't care about it so I deleted it, but now, I find myself having 2 non-continuous unallocated partitons as seen there:

http://i129.photobucket.com/albums/p...aster/part.jpg

I want to merge them to install Win7 on it. I though that I could do it with Ubuntu's installation CD's partition software(Gparted I think), but I need some help.

1-How should I do it? Is there a better program to use?, or can I do it from Ubuntu? I need some instructions.

2- I'm aware that this is a process that will most likely take a couple of hours. Do you have an estimate?

3- Is there any risk of data loss?

I hope this is clear.
Thanks.

I'm not sure how good the windows 7 installer is, but I know windows XP had at least some basic formatting options in the setup program. If you have the windows CD, you could at least pop it in and see if there are any options to resize the partitions.

GParted should work fine. You may have to do two resizes - one to fill up the one empty space and the other to expand the remaining empty space.
It should only take an hour or so, but allocating at least a couple hours wouldn't hurt.
You do want to do the actual formatting of the new partitions (after resize/move) with the windows disk though.

As always, modifying partition tables is a risky procedure (especially coupled with a partition resize). Anything valuable should be backed up before attempting such a modification.
That said, for what it's worth, I have done several similar procedures before and never had a problem.

I see. I'll try this and come back if I have a problem or a question.
For now, thank you.

I haven't used the official win7 release, but I've installed the rc a couple of times, and the only options available for resizing was one way (left to right or right to left, can't remember) and didn't provide an option for moving a partition as you are wanting to do, I am sure of this since I was in the same situation. The program I used (under windows) was free and worked great. It is Partition Wizard Business Edition. It was free from www.download.com I believe and was recommended over partition magic for compatibility with advanced operations on ntfs-3g filesystems. I've used it twice for moving large/full partitions around with good results.

Good luck

If I have trouble with Gparted I'll try your suggestion.
thanks