removing hiden partition?

I've made the Sony recovery dvds and now I was wondering if there is a way to remove the hidden partition and free up the space without doing a system reinstall. Is it possible just to delete the recovery partition without affecting what's already installed?
Thanks.

 

I'm not sure what SONY is doing or has been doing (are they doing something like Dell did with Media Direct 2?) ...if you have a hidden partition there are TWO great tools for "exposing it" and changing or deleting them

PTEDIT -DL it and boot up from a "floppy" (DOS) or bootable USB/CD/DVD and edit the "hidden" (now shown) partition tables to reflect the main partition (just don't put more than one "80" in the type- that is what windows looks for when finding the "boot" drive). In the first column of PTEDIT you have to change the letters or numbers to something like 0c (zero-cee) or similar (read the "readme" included!)

The other tool ,for finding, exposing and editing HPA's is
HDAT2 -by some guy in Romania as I recall. Google it and DL it and put it on the same boot media as above. READ the instructions carefully as this one is more comprehensive. However, even if you might screw up your HD, you won't until you set something, so go ahead and look around in every menu you find. The HPA has it's own menu and can be unlocked and then edited and resized- however it's not a "user friendly" app so be prepared- you're not working in windows.

If HDAT2 or PTEDIT are too much and too technical, I don't know what will happen IF you wipe the partitions away, but you CAN wipe them with a low level format tool (find something that writes all zeros to the drive as well, that always helps, though it takes a long time). I think Seagate and Toshiba make "disk tools" for this sort of low-level formatting.
That will erase any partitions, hidden or not, except the HPA, if there is one.

Don't use something like Maxtor's tools to create anything... and I'm not sure about Western Digital's drive tools either (don't recollect).

Drop me a note if you need a bump for some more help. I'll see it in a few days latest. Sorry I can't help on the Sony functioning without the hidden partitions- but someone ought to know here!

PEace

-JP

 

p.s. Partition Magic will allow you to resize and recover (add to existing partition) or make a new partition in the recovered space. I think the free or demo version might do this... search around or check MajorGeeks or drop me a note. I check my emails on here about once a week usually, if I'm mnear internet.

-JP

 

You can use Acronis Disk Director to do this, but I don't recommend it even if you have made the recovery DVDs, who knows what happens? for a few GBs worth I think i'll keep the recovery partition for that black day

 

I've done it with Partition Magic 8.0.
First, burn Recovery DVD.
Next, delete recovery partition.
Next Resize/Move main partition.
You just gained 6GB.

I did have a slight problem with my previous laptop.
When I tried to recover it from DVD with the option for no recovery partition,I had some stuff not working properly.
I end up recovering it to the factory settings, with recovery partition and again deleting it afterwards.

 

I guess it's better to keep it then since it only occupies 6 GB.

thanks for the advise everyone.

 

Would like to note something as well,

when you use the recovery DVDs you created to restore your computer, it will grey out the first and most important option (restore only drive C

this means you would have to do a complete recovery!! losing all your valueable data on D:!

that's the main reson i kep the restoration partition!

 

I believe on newer models you just recover from recovery dvds then choose the option to not keep the value added contents. For older models you just do a c and d drive recovery and dont keep the recovery partition. There is a command but i dont remember it right now but it basically unprotects the partition so you can just delete it in disk management. In vista then you just right click the c drive and expand it but your so much better off keeping the partition unless you have a tz with 32gb ssd. On the ux you have no built in dvd drive.. why dont people just buy an external hard drive or stop by vssadmin to shrink the shadow volume copy space.