DELL Partition

I have DELL Inspiron 1720 and it has just a single partition of size 220GB on which the Vista HP edition is installed. My HDD also has three other primary partition one for recovery, another for DELL Media Direct and another primary partition for diagnostic checkups, and these three occupy the remaining disk space out of 250GB.

Now i need to resize the OS installed primary partition. When I use the built-in partition manager I am able to shrink the OS partition but not able to allocate the newly created partition as Vista pops out a msg saying "Not enough space available for new partition". So now about 97GB of my HDD remains unallocated. Will I lose data if I extend the primary OS partition again.?

I read in Microsoft Tech Help Site that OEM systems have these prob with four primary partition and they are working on it to overcome this bug in Vista SP1?

Are any third party free s/w available to resize the partition into secondary partition without re install or data backup? How would GParted be able to help me on this.?

Plz suggest if possible any soln without need for data back up as I don hav media to back up around 110GB..!!
Help me.

 

You will not lose any data if you re-enlarge it.

GParted should be able to do it.

If you're not using them, I recommend deleting the other partitions.

 

Any idea abt the bug to be fixed in Vista SP1 or should i go ahead with GParted?