Help me repartition my 1520

I recently had a close call with Vista (almost) "exploding" and me thinking I was going to have reinstall Vista/Factory recover image and lose my date. Thankfully I avoided that but now am gun shy so I wanted to create a new partition just for my data so if I had to reimage the Vista Drive/Partition i wouldn't lose my data.

So I got GParted and shrunk the OS (C partition to 40gb and now have 50gb unallocated space. But when I try to create a new partition on it it says I already have 4 primary partitions and that's the maximum.

Dell tells me the 4 are:
- OS/Vista
- recovery (factory image)
- MediaDirect
- Diagnostics

So unless I want to delete/lose MediaDirect/Diagnostics or recovery (which I don't think I do - at least not quite yet) am I completed r**ted? Is there no way for me to add a data partition?

Dell also tells me that if I add such a data partition they won't support it and it voids my warranty on the HD - WTF? what does partitions have to do with the warranty of the hardware?

The only other option I can think of is to move the OS partition so that the unallocated space is right after the recovery (D partition and then extend that so that it includes space for my data - I think this will take some time in GParted.

Can anyone help or suggest how I can best go about this?

Thanks

 

Anyone?

Mods can you move this to the OS forum since it's not getting any answers on this one?