Vista Ultimate changed Primary partitions to Dynamic and created hidden partition with the primary "partitions" listed as Volumes

I need a bit of help, and probably an understanding, with Vista Ultimate Disk Management, and how to resolve my Primary Partition Problems.

(Photo attached to illustrate where I am now), not where I've been.

Background:

Before I encountered my problem, I had four primary partitions, one OEM, 78mb, one Recovery partition, 10mb (both from Dell), my OS Partition, and another "empty partition." Again, All primary.

The last partition I mentioned above , the "empty" one that I intended on installing XP on, was born from the space of media center partition, (also from Dell), but made it larger. Vista only allowed me to make this a simple partition on its creation, and not Primary.

I did make this partition Primary using the DISKPART tool. Then I had four Primary Partitions. I found i liked vista and did not want to put XP on system, so I deleted the last partition. Three partitions left, (seen in photo, Disk management).

When I did, and this is the problem, the deletion of this partition caused my Recovery partition and Operating system partition to cahnge to "Simple Dynamic." Vista Starts fine but if I attempt to access the recovery, which i tried to, to perform a recent recovery to resolve this issue issue, I can't access the recovery partition. I beleive due to it being a Simple Dynamic Partition. (you can see this in the photo).

Back into DISKPART. Diskpart lists 4 partitions, (photo again), the 4th not listed in Disk Management. this partition only 184 kb with an offset of 233 gb. If i make this partition active, and list volumes, it appears my primary partitions are somehow attached to or are a part of this reference to the hidden partition. (this is the DISKPART screen listed in the photo.)

How do I restore my OS and recovery partitions to "Primary", and rid myself of partition 4, listed in DiskPart. I tried to delete this partition and DISKPART would not let me. I guessing since it has the reference to the Operating System. I'm thinking I'm glad I could not delete it.

Any help or responses would be much appreciated.

You need to keep the recovery partition if you ever want to restore the system to condition it was when it was shipped to you. Unless you created an image yourself the day it arrived, the system has been altered since you've used it. Either create recovery disks from the partition (if possible) or keep it.

Back in the OLD DOS days where a programs stood by itself, then one could rebuild the C drive with a new version or build of DOS and the programs still ran without needing to be reinstalled. When the larger drive can out back then, (over 30 Megs) the minimum files size was quite large and wasted a lot of disk space. One of the methods to reduce the Minimum files size was to keep the partitions small.

I use TrueImage and have a separate USB drive that I I store my TI images on. If you do NOT save the images on a separate drive then you will lose them when the main hard drive fails. Partitions are NOT good for protection.

I do have 3 partitions on most of my machine, but, that is so I can "Dual" boot and run Beta software.