I am running out of disk space and want to know if there is a way to use a partition software like powerquest partition magic to remove the hp recovery partition and transfer the space to my real hard drive

You would be better served to add another hard drive to your system. A 40Gb or 80Gb drive can be obtained for a surprisingly low price nowadays.

The trick is to change the hidden recovery partition's type code to make it "visible", and then use a partition manager such as Partition Magic to merge the space into your system drive. There are a few ways to do this, including using some freely available Linux utilities; there are a number of suggestions in this thread:

http://www.experts-exchange.com/Misc..._21013072.html

You probably don't want to do that, anyways.

How much space are we talking here? I know that Dell uses a very small (under 50MB) partition for diagnostics and utilities, but I don't know how big HP's partition is.

Knowing how HP likes to work, I wouldn't delete the partition. More than likely, that's an image of your system's factory-fresh installation on it; delete that, and you might not be able to restore your system when Windows XP tanks out on you.

Normally I would agree with you Alex, but get this- the size of HP's recovery partition can be on the order of GigaBytes these days. I know that a lot of vendors have found that to be a cheap and easy way of giving customers some sort of a recovery solution without the vendor having to manufacture and ship a separate set of recovery CDs, but:

A) A set of recovery CDs may still be obtainable if you contact the vendor., and they may come at no cost if you request them within a certain time-frame after purchasing the computer. This is a more robust solution IMHO anyway- what if your whole drive gets seriously whacked? Having your recovery data on the same drive as the operating system isn't going to help in a case like that. I can attest to that scenario, because I've had to deal with it personally.

B) Those "diagnostic" or "recovery" partitions can play holy hell with many partitioning/formatting utilities, especially when it comes to setting up multi-boot systems. You've probably run across over at JL; I know I have.

I will say that Catweazle's suggestion of simply adding another drive is the safest approach, especially for those not comfortable with advanced/complex partition management. 40G or so drives are comparatively dirt-cheap these days, and you can free up a lot of space on your system drive just by moving much of your data files to such a drive. The other good thing about that approach is that if your system drive goes down and you have to reformat it, all of your precious music files and p0rn downloads will probably still be intact. :mrgreen:

the hp recovery on my pc is 5 gbs

I posed a similar question a while back and got no definitive response. Partition Magic will do just about all is asked of it, I have used it extensively, perhaps too much, but have had no problems altering/changing/deleting partitions of any kind. Also, Win XP computer management will also allow the deletion of that partition. Although I got the HP restore disks from HP, I was still a bit leery about removing the partition. I simply tinker too much and wanted to keep the restore readily available.

Since my HP (MediaCenter m260n) had internal space for only one hard drive, I took a chance and removed the floppy drive and stuuck in another 120G harddrive. So far, so good. Since my computer has all the media card readers accessible from the front panel, I feel I ain't really gonna miss the floppy. It's a thought, but please use your own judgement.

That's a thoughtfully put comment, Lurch, and I'd agree with it entirely. The few gigabytes talen up by a restore partition is really very little to sacrifice with the size of hard drives available today, and retaining it can prove quite valuable.

The floppy drive is, as you say, virtually redundant now, and the only thing I ever use one for myself nowadays is to flash BIOS. Even that is a task which can be performed without a floppy. I only use a floppy drive for it through personal preference, and where a system has no such drive it's quite easy to attach one temporarily. With the size of files, the cheapness of blank CDs, and the availability of USB pendrives, floppies are not needed for data storage.

I realize that-- Dell's recovery partition is 3GB, for instance, and its diagnostic partition is about 32 MB.

Oh, I agree with you completely. If the drive fubars, then your restore image fubars. Which is why I don't really like the idea of "just" a restore partition. I'm all for companies that provide not only a restore partition, but the original OS media, a practice done by Dell, Howard, Toshiba, and Sony, I believe. I feel you should have both options, as the restore partition can be immensely more convenient than doing a complete Windows reinstall, drivers and all.

Now, for point B, I agree with you again. However, I was looking at it this time from a Joe Sixpack or a one-OS is fine for me standpoint. If they don't ever have to worry about repartitioning, then things should be cool.

Oh, I definitely agree that looking at this from the "Joe Sixpack" perspective is a Good Thing. I just threw that out there because I know that many of here deal with the "Tommy Twelvepack" side of it... you know- 1 six pack of Windows, 1 six pack of Linux (or BSD). :mrgreen: