How/Can I get rid of (and backup) my recovery partition?

It's taking up 10gig of my precious space, and I want to put my music/vids/pictures on a separate partition (D)

I think want to back it up/make a new one and hopefully save it on a DVD, however, that being said I'm running a clean install of Vista so is there even any point?

After that, how/can I repartition my drive so my Users/David folders are on D with the OS on C?

 

You can use gparted to erase the partition and resize them for you.

 

+1 for GParted

 

I never used the recovery partition on my 1520. If you're going to do a clean install of Vista, you don't need GParted, even though it's an amazing software and I used it yesterday to resize my Vista partition to make room for Windows 7 beta Just put in your Vista disc and boot from it. Delete all the partitions you see in the Vista setup (where it asks you where to install Vista), then create two new partitions with the now unpartitioned space (one for Vista and one for data).

 

I deleted it after 2 weeks.... It doesn't make any sense to have it

 

Just rip the data to DVD. Vista has some built in partition management tools. Just type computer management in the search bar or path out to it (right click computer > computer management). Highlight the d drive and reformat it. You can then use it for whatever, or attempt to resize it. It works well enough. If you need to do anything fancier than that you will probably like Gparted better.