Not sure what to do with the recovery partition...

[SaderBiscut]

I have a T42 with the recovery partition still on it, and I'm not really sure what to do with it. I don't need the recovery partition on the laptop, and I could really use the five or so gigabytes of space it takes up, but I don't want to outright delete it, as I do not have the recovery CDs anymore.

I have space on other computers that I could host a diskimage of some kind, but I'm not sure what the best method to do this would be.

In a few months, I am probably going to be buying a much larger harddrive (only 40/36GB currently, only 31gb of which is actually usable to me), but currently I am stuck with a 40GB one and as I previously stated, the five gigabytes of space would be more useful to me than the recovery partition.

If you are curious as to why I don't need the recovery partition, if Windows was to randomly die I would need to get the data off of the harddrive before restoring it, and I would be ill-equipped to do so in most places that I wouldn't have other methods of restoring the laptop. Secondly, I don't like the idea of someone simply being able to press the rather large "Access IBM" button on startup and inadvertantly wiping my laptop, however unlikely this may be.

[RealBlackStuff]

Buy Acronis TrueImage and take an image now. (store it e.g. on your PC hard disk)
Then take incremental images every week or so until you get your larger HD.
Alternatively, buy the larger HD now, and clone your old one onto it.
Then keep the old HD as a backup.
In either case you can delete the recovery partition and extend your C partition to include the free space, or create another partition in that free space.

[SaderBiscut]

I might end up needing a new harddrive sooner rather than later, strange errors keep popping up here and there with file intregrity.

Oddly enough, it seems fine aside from these errors, so I'm not really sure what to think.

[dr_st]

I have a T42 with the recovery partition still on it, and I'm not really sure what to do with it. I don't need the recovery partition on the laptop, and I could really use the five or so gigabytes of space it takes up, but I don't want to outright delete it, as I do not have the recovery CDs anymore.

Have you burnt a set of recovery CDs in the past? If not, you can still do it. If so, I guess you can't, unless you actually perform a factory restore.

Secondly, I don't like the idea of someone simply being able to press the rather large "Access IBM" button on startup and inadvertantly wiping my laptop, however unlikely this may be.

Doing it by accident is impossible. If you are afraid of malicious intent, then I think (not sure) you can disable the access to the hidden partition in the BIOS, and put a password on the BIOS.

[SaderBiscut]

I had already installed too much stuff before I realized I could make a new recovery disk set.

However, I am noticing "file integrity errors" pop up alot now, and several installshield files refuse to install at all (despite mutiple install attempts, installer redownloads, ect), and alot of things just stop citing crc errors.

Could there be any correlation between this and APS? My laptop recently has heavily been used as a litteral laptop causing APS to be triggered alot..

[dr_st]

However, I am noticing "file integrity errors" pop up alot now, and several installshield files refuse to install at all (despite mutiple install attempts, installer redownloads, ect), and alot of things just stop citing crc errors.

Could be your hard drive or your RAM.

Ran a HD scan, including bad sectors, and also try Memtest86 to check for RAM errors.

[Rich.Carpenter]

I had already installed too much stuff before I realized I could make a new recovery disk set.

I don't think the recovery disc set would include anything except what was on your machine when you got it from the factory.