Hidden protected area to keep or delete

[christopherjpreston]

I have an X60 with Vista Business. I live in Japan and received a Japanese model with Japanese OS. I installed a fresh version of Vista in English and I have this activated and working fine.

However, I have not touched the hidden partition and the original predesktop area was in Japanese. Is there any point to keeping this partition or should I delete. Is there any way to access it.

Since installing the english version of vista I no longer have access at startup to the predesktop area and I felt there was no point in making recovery disks for an OS language I had no use for.

Thanks
Chris

[ashleys]

The first thing I did when I got my T30 was delete the hidden partition. To me it's a waste of space. When I need to do a system restore, I need my system back as close to the last good running version, not to level it was for a "factory restore".

On the T30 you just disable HPA in the BIOS and then use a partitioning program (or even Windows Setup) to delete the partition.

I have Rescue and Recovery installed on my system partition and so I can still use the pre-desktop area.

In your instance I see no worth in keeping the HPA.

[Kyocera]

Delete it IF you have recovery CD's and IF you need the space. It does take a little longer to do a recovery to factory from the CD's but that is not a big deal really to some.