Erasing the recovery partition...

I recently read to be VERY careful when using System Restore, not to restore on the same drive where the recovery partition is located. This is a bit of an inconvience and may not allow to me to use system restore...

I then thought, is it safe to erase the recovery partition, due to the fact I have it backed up on a dual layer DVD? It would also save space. Is it recommended?

If so... where is it located, and how would I go about removing it?

 

I believe Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management, then go down to Disk Management will show you partition on your HD.

Make sure it is the right partition, then right click on the partition and delete.

Then you can right click and make a new partition, then format it so you can use the space.

 

i erased it and nothing went wrong... i had one big 80 gig partition then allocated 15 gigs to linux..

 

Be careful though.

I had created the DVD, everything went well.
The next day I tried to do a fresh install: I selected the option to delete the recovery partition and started recovery using the DVD I had created.

I couldn't it kept hanging after 50%.
JY

 

So basically you were testing to see if it worked, and it hanged at 50%? Can you not use the computer now?

 

What I did was the following:

I cleaned the computer up with just Windows and the basic programs that I needed (Office, etc). I then used partition magic to delete the hidden partition. I then cloned the partition that I had the clean install on, and shrunk it to only the size that it took up, and hid it. Voila - my own "custom" recovery partition

 

well, at the end I did a clean install following the instructions described on this forum...

JY

 

this will not work in most cases.
The default Windows partition is the 2nd partition, so if you use partition magic only you computer will not boot anymore unless you modify boot.ini manually, which not everybody is able to do

 

You can fix this by moving the order of the partitions within partition magic

 

What is partition magic? I'm still very interested in doing something with my recovery partition but am still unsure what exactly I should do :S

 

Partition Magic is a program that lets you divide your hard drive in to logical divisions (create partitions). Partitions allow hard disks to have different file system on a single disk, good for dual booting, etc, etc. In this case, the recovery partition lets you restore your Sony XP install.

There's a free partitioning program out there as well called Gparted ( http://gparted.sourceforge.net/) ... it basically boots from CD in a Linux and allows you to create different types of Windows or Linux partitions (NTFS, FAT32, ext3, etc etc).

 

Would you recommend me getting Partition Magic and ... altering my partition?

 

depends on why you want to create the partition.

My personal opinion is that you don't need the partition at all. Make your recovery DVDs and back them up to multiple locations (i.e. external HD, DVDs or other media), and then do a semi-restore as per the instructions on this site. This will remove the partition completely from your system, freeing up the diskspace and allowing you to prevent the installation of a lot of the bloatware.

but in general, if you want a partition, but don't want the default sony partiton, then use Gparted... it's free and just as good. They have a Live CD version which lets you boot from CD, so you don't need to install anything on your computer.

 

Right, a semi-restore... would that involve losing my settings/work/data? That sounds like the best option. I'll backup the partition another time first though, and store that at home (I'm studying abroad and will take the primary backup DVD with me).

May I ask; if I was to delete the partition, would that delete the partition wizard itself on the VAIO? Many thanks for your help