Beyond the natural risks involved fiddling with your partition table, it's a perfectly quick and pretty safe procedure. I've done it many many times (like ~50) with no problems, but if you are really risk-averse then the alternative of copying is of course 100% risk free. Just make sure you don't have a power cut in the middle
The method is to simply delete the second partition and then expand the first. The only thing I would suggest you do is defragment both partitions first - that minimizes the chance of Windows drives choking on the resize.
Partition Magic is an excellent choice, as Ross suggests, but there are decent free alternatives available as well. Something like fdisk (the linux one) will be fine (if you don't need graphics), the ultimate boot cd has a few, and the system rescue cd has a few, including a graphical partition magic clone.
The only thing I'd suggest is that if you go for a free one you run it past us first to make sure it's decent as there is no doubt some rubbish out there.
Oh yes, and backup your data first. No, really!
[ 04-10-2006, 02:04 PM: Message edited by: shamrock_uk ]