There are several ways to go, but WHS's idea is probably the slickest and probably the quickest. It's OK for C to be a logical partition, but you need Partition Wizard to do the conversion.
You are victim of HP's idea on what partitions should be on a PC. There is a hard limit of 4 primary and they ship with 4, so you are screwed unless you can get back to 3 in some way. That way is by going to a logical.
thnxx for the suggestion i will try the same and will report the result.As long as you have 4 primary partitions on the disk, creating more partitions is a no go. I suggest you download and burn the bootable cd of Partition Wizard (last entry on the webpage). Boot the system with this disc, highlight the C partition and convert it to a logical partition. The controls are in the Partition tab > Modify. Don't forget the APPLY (left bottom).
Now you have only 3 primary partitions and can create additional logical/extended partitions.
Wolfgang's suggestion to convert C to Logical and then create a new Logical sub-partition in the empty space is the best approach I've found with HP's when the user wants to keep the Recovery and HP Tools (bootable diagnostics) partitions bootable.
Most tech enthusiasts however don't want the bloated HP Preinstall but will sooner or later Clean Reinstall - Factory OEM Windows 7.
Burn a copy of the recovery discs and then you can do away with the recovery partition. It makes no sense at all to have your only recovery method stored on the same hard drive. Then, you can create a new partition with the combined space of the unallocated and recovery partition.
Although this is a possible option, I would only go down this route if I had secured my system with an additional image or two. Depending on the burnt recovery discs only is dangerous because you never know if they will really work (unless you try them out - but then you need an image too).
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