Trying to recover unallocated space in a drive with 3 primary and 1 extended partitions

[flashbacck]

I just upgraded the 120gb HD on my Dell laptop to a 320gb seagate drive. To do the upgrade I cloned the drive (using the dd command in linux - this was my friend's suggestion to get an exact clone). This copied the partition table, of course, and I thought it would be easy to extend the existing partition to the full HD size.

Not so!

Dell has kindly put a ton of crap onto the drive into separate partitions.
see here: http://pics.bbzzdd.com/users/flashbacck/partition.JPG

As you can see from the pic there already exists 3 primary and an extended partition so I am unable to create a new partition from the unallocated chunk at the end. The two partitions following "Main" are "MediaDirect" (Dell's quick bootup media player) and Dell System Restore.

Does anyone have suggestions on how I can get to my unallocated space? I was thinking I could copy the Dell System Restore somewhere else, then extend the extended partition. Then create two new partitions within that, a small one for the Dell Sys. Res. and another with the remaining space...

Or, is it possible to move the Dell Sys Res. partition to the end of my drive? That way the unallocated space could be extended into by the extended partition.

 

[Blain]

Are you running a 32-bit OS?

If so, use EaseUS Home version to manage your partitions.
It works like Partition Magic.
I've used it a few times to resize even my C: drive. No problems at all.

 

[flashbacck]

yup. XP.

 

[flashbacck]

Originally posted by: Blain
Are you running a 32-bit OS?

If so, use EaseUS Home version to manage your partitions.
It works like Partition Magic.
I've used it a few times to resize even my C: drive. No problems at all.

Yay! It was ridiculously easy how well EaseUS was to use. I literally just had to drag the two Dell partitions to the end of the drive, and extended the extended partition to include the unallocated chunk. Thanks!