Problems w/partitions on Dell Image

Hi,

My brand new Dell Dimension E520 came with Vista Home Premium pre-installed
on the 250GB hard drive. The drive was set up as a single partition. This
does not suit my needs, so I attempted to use the built-in Disk Manager
utility to set up new partitions. It didn't work.

To be clear, the drive actually arrived with three partitions on it; the C:
NTFS partition where the OS was installed, a D: NTFS partition labelled
Recovery, and an inaccessible, unlabelled EISA partition. I have not
attempted to make any changes to or remove the D: and EISA partitions. The
C: partition encompasses 224GB of the 250GB (theoretical) drive, so that is
where the changes need to occur.

I first shrank the C: partition, using the Disk Management utility, but it
would only shrink by about 110 GB, despite having only 36.8 GB in use.
That's including the Page File. This left me with a C: drive of about 120GB,
most of which was empty. Repeating the process would not shrink the
partition more than another 1GB, or so.

So, I tried moving moving the paging file to the new partition created on
the freed up space, defragging C:, rebooting and trying again. No change.
Hours of research on MS KB, Technet, Google, and several calls to Dell
later, there's still no change.

Despite the mixed reviews, I downloaded Acronis Disk Director (ADD, nice
acronym), created the bootable Rescue Disc, and tried that. It can't even
see the physical drive, let alone the partitions on it. It sees my external
USB drive, but not the internal SATA drive. So, figuring I have nothing to
lose, I installed ADD in Vista and ran it there. Same thing. It doesn't even
see the drive. I have not been able to find any other reports of this
particular problem.

I don't see this as an Acronis problem, though. There's clearly something
wrong with the image Dell is using to set these machines up. Whether it's
their fault or Microsoft's would be hard to prove, but sizing an existing
partition is not one of the known issues with Vista, so I believe it's
Dell's fault.

I have Partition Magic 8.0, and I haven't tried that, yet, but I'm not sure
it's worth the effort. For one thing, there are more reported problems with
it than with ADD. But also, if I have to struggle this much to overcome this
one problem that shouldn't exist, how many others are lurking in the
background? So, since Dell refuses to take any responsibility for this, or
offer any assistance, I'm currently planning on returning the machine. Why
should I be stuck with a defective OS on a brand new machine?

So, at this point, I don't expect much, but I'll take any suggestions,
advice, or commentary anyone cares to offer, and hope this serves as a
warning to other folks in the market for a new machine.

Thanks!