I originally posted this in the laptop forum but i think the same concepts and procedures would apply to desktops. I recently purchased a Inspiron 1720 with two hard drives (320 x 2, non-RAID) and am trying to partition the second hard drive into three drives of about 100gbs each.  I tried to shrink the drive by 102 gb (originally the disk management utility said I had about 305 gb available) so as to have a 202gb partition (which I would then shrink in half to give me two 101gb partitions in additon to the first one of 101gb).  However, I was unable to do anything with the 101gb of unallocated space so I reformatted the entire drive and now I only have 298gb available.

 What is the best way to format the drive into 3 equal partitions and recover the now missing 7gb? The answers in the help section are very basic and seem to omit some important steps to accomplish this.