merging patitions

I'm going to be doing a format of my c: drive followed by a full reinstall and update, and I had a question. my main hard drive, is split into a 30 gig (c) and a 130 gig (d) partition. iv been looking for instructions on how to merge these back into one single drive, but I'm coming up empty besides 'use partition magic'. anyone have any advice for me? thanks.

Use parted.

But why would you want to do that? It's a good setup, keep the volatile stuff (Windows, Programs) on one relatively small partition and the data you want to keep on another one.