[matthewheath]

I am wondering if I can should delete or can delete my Hp recovery partition. I backup weekly to a external hard drive. would this be safe. Matt

[Flashorn]

Hey matt!!



Welcome to PCWorld Community!



Short answer "Yes"



Long answer. First, It is a good to know that you have habits that will protect you

against unforeseen disasters.

Now, I don't know the reason you would want to recover a small amount of space

by deleting the Recovery Partition but, I personally would not recommend it.



Before you do delete this partition , did you create the "restore discs' that HP has

asked to do when you first got the PC booted up and running.

If you did not , it would be advisable to do so. This procedure would involve burning

the partition to CD or DVD. The preferred media would be DVD as there would be

less media to burn.(about 3 DVDs).



OK, enough with the advice. If you would really like to erase this partition from your HDD,

HP has these procedures for you to follow.

Removing the HP Recovery Partition .



If you click on the Hyper link above , this will bring you to HP's site where you can follow the step by step,

to delete the partition.



Hope this will help you. ( I still don't recommend it).





FLASHORN. !http://forums.pcworld.com/legacyimages/
1!

[rgreen4]

Matt - Welcome to the PC World Community.

As the owner of several HP computers, a piece of advice. Depending on how you back up you may be safe in removing the recovery partition. Although like Flashorn, I don't recommend it.

I had a recovery partition on my HP Media Center when it came with XP Media Center Edition and had a number of problems with it. I had to use the recovery partition a couple of time to fix driver probems and once to do a full re-install. Now the recovery partition and recovery discs have one drawback, when doing a full reinstall they restore the PC hard drive to the factory shipped condition meaning all the bloatware you removed is back and all your programs and data are gone. Thus the importance for good backups.

Most backup programs I have seen in the past cannot restore completely a machine with a hard drive problem, because they have to be started from the hard drive. One I recommend is Acronis True Image which can actually clone the HD onto another HD. This is useful if you want to install a larger HD, for Acronis will proportionally increase or decrease all the partitions on the new HD to match the old HD. Thus if you are going from an 80GB to a 160GB, a partition that covered 90% of the old drive will cover 90% of the new drive. You then can put the new drive in the machine to operate from and the old fully functional drive in the closet to use as an emergency backup. Swapping drives takes a lot less time than restoring does. For a more in depth discussion here is a related [document|d-1276] on the topic.

I no longer have the recovery partition on my Media Center because that machine is now Vista and the recovery partition was XP MCE. However, even though I have a good up-to-date clone of the drive in my laptop (I update my clone with each software installation/upgrade) and have a set of recovery discs burned from the recovery partition, I have not deleted the recovery partition. My laptop is now Vista SP1, the recovery partition is Vista before SP1 and is almost a year old. I am almost getting to that point, but it does not hurt anything to keep it a while longer.

When you decide to delete the recovery partition, HP has done you a favor in two ways: 1. It should be the last partition and should be easy to recover the space, and 2: They give you an application ot do it.

Just remember - you cannot have too many backups.