Question reguarding the partitioning of my new Compaq v3000.

Hey,

I just brought a new Compaq Presario v3000 and it comes standard with a 60Gb Hard Drive. When I go into My Computer to veiw my Hard Drive, I see that it has been split into two partitions by HP.

One Partition is the main partition, and then there is this other sneaky little partition called 'Presario_RP' or something. This 'Presario_RP' partition is FAT32, heavily fragmented and using up almost 9Gb of my 60Gb Hard Drive. When I try to open it a Compaq message shows up saying that I cannot modify its contents as this is for the purpous of a system restore.

What I want to know is do I actually need this partition and can I get rid of it without screwing up my machine, becuase 9gigs taken out of a 60gig hard drive is alot of space which I am missing.

Any help greatly appriciated.

 

If you have burnt your recovery discs then you can safely delete the recovery partition.

 

I have burnt my recovery discs, at the cost of my last two blank DVD's (Thanks HP... stingey bastards).

Once it is deleted I take it the 9gb will merge back into my existing main partition but how do I go about deleting it using Windows XP?

 

No, it wont merge with your main partition. It will remain as a separate partition. If you want to merge it then you will have to use a third party utility like Gnome partition manager(free) or Partition Magic etc... To delete the recovery partition-Right click on My Computer->Manage->Disk Management-> You should see 2 partitions->Right click on the recovery partition and delete it. The partition will become unpartitioned space and you can either format it to a different partition or use a partiton manager and merge it ith the main partition.

 

I have the same thing on my new HP dv9000. The "D:" drive is the recovery info. If you browse to it, you cannot see the files or access them at all. I bought the recovery disc with the laptop, so I don't think I need this partition (do I?). If so, I want to nuke it. However, I'd like to see how they blocked the viewing of the files the way they did.

 

That is your restore Partition. If something goes wrong with your laptop you can restore it to its origanal form using that parttion

 

Just one more question, would a merge be possible as the restore partition is FAT32 and my main partition is NTFS?