Merging the (ex)recovery partition

Hi all,

Apologies if this is an all too common question, I've tried searching throughout the day, but what I have found hasn't helped me so far (But at the same time, I have little confidence in my search skills).

On my Inspiron 1720, I have two harddrives.

On the first drive, I had the typical four Dell partitions;
|Apps/70MB||Recovery/10GB||Vista/220GB||MediaDirect/2.5GB|
A quick play in disk management has turned it into;
|Unallocated/10GB||Vista/220GB||Unallocated/2.5GB|

What I want to do is to merge the unallocated 10GB partition into the Vista partition, ie |Vista||Unallocated| (The last bit doesn't matter, as I'm going to setup the drive with 3 other partitions, and doing that is trivial compared to this)

I really don't want to re-install Vista (I know how to do it that way, but I'd really prefer not to).

Can anyone who's succesfully done this operation let me know how they did it? Without any great hassles/loss of data?

Thanks in advance.

 

One option would be making an image of the Vista installation using things like Norton Ghost or PartImage, merging the partition, formatting it, and then restoring the image.

fixmbr and fixboot might be in order after that