Z12 delete recovery partition without reformatting

I have no use for the recovery partition and I really need the space. Ive seen a few posts saying you need to basically nuke the entire installation and start over in order to kill the recovery partition, but has anyone discovered a better way yet? Thanks!

 

I bit the bullet and nuked my whole installation. On the recovery CD's, There's an option that lets you recover the C partition with minimal software and delete the recovery partition which alone accounts for 11-14gigs of space.

The minimal software option gets rid of most of the Sony Bloatware but save the Adobe bundle.

 

Yes, it is possible to remove the restore partition without reinstalling. But you need to know how to use command line tools including bcdedit, and you still need a real (not "recovery") Windows DVD in order to run a boot repair, and a Linux installation with gparted or similar to be able to actually remove the partition.

And, once you've done that, you're left with a small unused space in front of your windows partition, and you can only grow NTFS at the end, not the start.

If you don't want to reinstall, your best bet is to ghost the system and boot partitions (Windows keeps the boot files on the system partiton and system files on the boot partition -- I know, I know), and then restore the ghost image without the restore partition.

 

The "restore C: drive" option may refuse to run if the original disc layout is changed. It may fail and tell you to select the full recovery option. In that you can choose a different disc layout and also to leave out some of the recovery area but you will still get a recovery area of about 1.5GB on your new setup. At least that's what happened to mine.