Recovery partition takes ALL free space?

How can I resize the boot partition to expand to take the empty space I left, when I formatted my drive.

No, not the easy answer -- DEBUG Disk Utility shows that the Recovery HD has taken all the empty space (180Gb!), preventing this obvious resizing.

So, maybe my question is: How do I resize & MOVE the Recovery HD partition to the bottom of the drive so that I can expand my OS X partition?

------ Specs:

Mid-2010 Mac Mini with that 320 Gb internal drive.

----- Details of the story:

I stick new 500 Gb drive in external, format, and clone the Mountain Lion partition over.

I used Carbon Copy or Super Duper!, but double checked things were xferred by using rsync.

A quick iFixit.com walk-through later, and I am up and running on a 500 Gb drive inside my Mac mini.

Oh - but this is not the end of the story. You see, I'd formatted the drive to have ~320 Gb partition for the Mountain Lion boot partition.

I was thinking ... Oh, this will be easier than taking up the WHOLE drive, then bootcamp-resizing it down for a Windows 7 partition.

Yes, I was thinking: leave some empty drive space, and bootcamp will be smart enough to ask about that empty space.

Issue #1 -- Bootcamp is not like a GUI Ubuntu installer, where you can resize partitions, choose the empty space, etc. It is plain simple in that it will take an 1-massive partitioned drive and do its thing.

Just reboot on the old, now-external, drive and resize the internal drive to take up the empty 180Gb space.

Easy to solve, right? No.

Issue #2

Somehow the partition table ended up with the Recovery HD partition taking up *all* of the remainder of the drive space!

Apple? Super Duper!? -- I don't know.

Go ahead, give it a try.

Disk Utility will let you slide the GUI and extend the partition -- but quickly pretends to repartition, but doesn't - and w/o a failure message.

GUI shows the empty space, but the DEBUG menu allows me to mount the hidden Recovery HD to see its 180Gb size.

Compare this to the 650 mb size of the previous drive's recovery partition.