I have an acer 5000 laptop with an 80 gig hard drive which is partitioned into a C and D drive.  the C drive is now full and i am concerned that it i make the D drive the active drive i will not be able to start the computer...i tried moving large data files ( photos and music) to the D drive to free up room but it did not delete them from the C drive...help

If the data you managed to move are only photos and music, try the software, that helps to find and delete duplicates. Then you can select to delete the files that are on your C disk. I am using free software Duplicate File Finder. It's not very easy to understand it at first look, but it does the job very well.

Partitions are seen by the computer as separate drives. When you try to move files by dragging and dropping, the default action is to copy, not move. So--you will have to actually delete them from the C partition if you copy them to the C partition.
I have no idea why Acer does this. When I come on to a problem like this, I usually combine the partitions with a utility such as Partition Magic.
Don't try to make the D partition bootable You won't like the result.
Try, instead, to move your data files over there. Just remember, when you save docs, be sure they are being saved to D and not C.
Hope this helps.