Frustrated with DV6-2138CA 4 primary partitions

I bought an HP DV6-2138CA and the 500GB hard drive has 4 primary partitions. There is a primary before the Windows7 partition (probably from Win7), the recovery partition primary and the HP tools primary. I created 1 set of recovery DVDs, as well burned the swsetup directory on a dvd.

I then installed Win7 Pro x64, after imaging the current Win7x64 Home, clobbering the Win7 home partition. Now I realize that one of the remaining 3 primary partitions have to be deleted if I want to create an extended partition to hold logical partitions for my use.

As a test I put a spare 160GB hard drive in the laptop and ran the recovery DVDs. It reinstalled Windows7 Home Premium and created the HP tools directory. However the recovery partition was not recreated. Rather than relying on one set of recovery DVDs I guess the only way to make a second recovery DVD set at this stage, is to copy my existing DVD set to a backup set.

My question is can I safely nuke the recovery partition, HP Tools partition and still get warranty support and if necessary send it into HP?

Update:

The recovery discs that I created are not copyable due to read errors. I restored the Win7 Home Premium but friggin HP says that I can not create another set! There is no HPCD.sys file at the root of the recovery partition that I can rename to get around this ridiculous restriction!

 

Finally found out that the name of the hidden file on c: and the recovery partition that has to be deleted or renamed is hpdrcu.prc and once I did that I was able to create a new set of recovery discs.

 

So no takers to my question on whether I safely nuke the recovery partition, HP Tools partition and still get warranty support and if necessary send it into HP?

I seen some posts on the web where people said the recovery program created the recovery partition. My brief test did not show that to be the case.

 

I blow them away all the time at work and they have never even asked me about it.