Using SSD for OS, Can I combine my old HDDs partitions?

I just installed an SSD for my OS (OCZ Vertex III 120GB), I formatted my old HDD and will be using it for most programs and games. When I go into computer management then disk management it shows that my old drive has 39MB allocated to the OEM Partition and 9.73 GB to the recovery partition. Can I delete these partitions and combine them on the drive?

Also, my SSD is 120GB, but I see that it only shows 111.79 GB of space (103.16 on the main partition and 8.54 GB as the recovery partition), is this normal that it has over 8 GB allocated some place I can't see? Sorry for the newb questions, but this is my first time using an SSD.

 

This has been said often, but the drive manufacturers advertise their drive capacity using base 10 (120GB = 120 000 000 000 Bytes), however, most OS count in binary (base 2) so 1GB = 1 073 741 824 Bytes) Divide 120GB base 10 by 1GB in binary and you get 111.76GB.

 

I thought I read something about that on here somewhere, but it was late last night and I gave up my search after a while. Thanks.

 

It's all marketing, RAM manufacturers at least don't fall into that mess when they say 1GB, it's 1024MB.

As for combining the partitions, you cannot extend a volume if the partition is before the one you want to extend using the windows disk management tool. Also be careful, your bootloader might be on the recovery or the OEM partition. Aside from that, as long as everything is aligned, there is no problem merging them, but you'll loose the factory recovery from disk option though.

 

I don't plan on messing with the SSD partitions. I was wondering if combining the partitions on my other drive that I use for programs and games would be ok.

 

Oh, as long as you have a backup of the recovery partition somewhere else than on the HDD (just in case), then yeah go ahead and merge away.