Alternate to asus's little recovery partition

I want to be able to use my entire hard drive so that i can boot quicker and have an extra 2 gbs of space. Is there another utility of some sort that can do the same thing as asus's
except that it can recover from an external hard drive instead of from the same hard drive?
It seems to me asus's recovery thing is crudely made as one:
If i accidentally start the utility it renders my 2nd partition unusable
The default format is in fat32 and converting to NTFS is worse than install from NTFS
the interface is so primitive
i wish there was something like IBM's thinkVantage thin

 

Well, it'd be intruding onto Lenovo's territory(aka lawsuit, nooooo!), if they did something like ThinkVantage(which of course would be great though).

Unfortunately, the recovery partition can only be created during a system restore(where the OS is then 'restored'), so you can't just create that little partition. I haven't played around with Partition Magic, so I don't know if you can move partitions around from hard drive to hard drive.

You still have the original restore cds, correct?

 

If you have Windows Vista, you will find that Norton PartitionMagic doesn't work, but there is a utility built into Vista that does all the same functions. If you have Vista, go to Control Panel Home, and in the search box top right just type in "Partitions" and it will come up. It is included in Administrative Tools.

 

I still use xp and I still have all the cd's

 

You can 'unhide' the partition with partition magic. You can remove the files from the partition and swap the file with another asus HDD with the same partition. But whatever you do done delete it.

You cannot re-make the partition and have it work.

You can make a partition just like it and put all the files back in, but it wont work! I've played around with them a fair bit when i swapped out a toshiba HDD for a Seagate.

Insane

 

That's a Bummer

 

really? I'd think that you would just need to make it bootable