MacOS – Unable to resize Lion partition

My suggestion

Don't try to resize from the Recovery partition. Boot into the normal partition and resize from there.

Background

diskutil list is misleading you. It is not the position of the recovery partition which is your problem.

I had a very similar setup, and here is the output of diskutil list for me:

  #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *500.1 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Macintosh HD            423.6 GB   disk0s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3
   4:                  Apple_HFS Temp Partition Test ... 74.8 GB    disk0s4
   5:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             792.2 MB   disk0s5

Partitions 4 and 5 had a dev version of Lion on them. I have just used Disk utility to delete partitions 4 and 5 and resize partition 2 to fill the space.

This worked - Disk Utility resized the main drive with no problem. So what have I done which is different to you? Well, I resized the main partition from booting into the main partition not the Recovery Partiion. You can resize a partition that you have booted from in Disk Utility.

It makes sense that the recovery partition would "get in the way" if you have booted from it, so I suspect that above suggestion might work for you.

As already mentioned, the free space is before the start of your partition. You can't grow a partition from the start - you can only expand it from its end.

You can try something like this:

1. Create a partition in the free space
2. Use something like Carbon Copy Cloner to copy the contents of your current partition into the new one
3. Boot from the new partition
4. Make sure everything works fine from the new partition - try all your usual programs, and make sure it's exactly the same as it always was
5. Delete the old partition
6. Expand the new partition to fill the hard disk space completely (reusing the space that was used by the old partition)

There are a few other options as well as Carbon Copy Cloner, but it has worked well for me in the past, and will make the target partition bootable.