Vista Home Premium + Upgrade Utility act as recovery discs?

Hey guys,

I was just wondering, would the Vista upgrade discs that HP sent me act as recovery discs, or is the recovery partition still relevant? I'm planning on making recovery discs soon and deleting the partition, but if the answer is yeah then I guess that'd save me a couple of DVDs. Thanks!

Also, what's the easiest way to allocate the recovery partition space back to C: once it's deleted?

 

I think the upgrade disc is just that, a upgrade disc.

Burn the recovery discs., make a image of the hard drive in case you need to do a recovery. You will need those disc(s) later if you call HP tech support to confirm a hardware problem.

Q: Allocate the recovery partition space
A: I'd use a disc partitioning program.

Google Hiren's BootCD... (I use it because it has all my programs in one place...)

This might work: http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php

Note BEFORE doing anything, you really want to run a FULL scan of the hard drive from the BIOS.... it's a good idea to do a checkdisc, plus you should defrag everything.

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I tested the official Vista system recovery disc from HP after I had removed all the partitions on my drive and it recreated the recovery partition and the F11 option to recover your PC from that newly re-created partition on the drive. I haven't yet tried it with the recovery disc you make yourself and I don't have a Vista upgrade disc to see how it works, but I suspect not.

I used Acronis True Image to make a image of the recovery partition and the master boot record on the drive, after I let the recovery disc recreate it. This way, if I decide to put the recovery partition back on the drive, it's very easy to do it now with Acronis, without have to use HP's disc and not having to go through the whole restore process which is quite time consuming.

I don't believe it put Quickplay back, however.