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Advice For Reclaiming Dell Recovery Partition

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Hi - I recently replaced a failing hard drive with a smaller SSD on a dell Alienware laptop. I used the disk clone in ATI 2013 which worked fine. However I still have 7GB in a recovery partition that is more needed (now that I'm at 250GB vs 750GB). W7 disk manager claims that the primary partition, boot, etc., is now on "C:" (the main partition). Can I get rid of, or re-task the recovery partition for an ATI image or should I just delete it and resize the main partition? How would I do that and also make sure Dell does not need it anymore? All the Google I read regarding this topic is spooky. I just want to see if there is some well trod process to use.

Thanks

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Dell Recovery partition is useful only to restore the PC to its original factory state. Once you begin installing software and using the computer, such a restore is much less useful and much less appealing.

I removed my Dell Recovery partition and thus freed up almost 20 GB of disk space. But, first I used Dell's backup utility to create the Recovery image to a USB flash drive (you could also choose three DVD-R disks), which could be used restore to Dell factory state if I ever sold the PC. I also moved boot files from Recovery partition to the OS partition.

First, you must ensure that the Recovery partition doesn't contain boot files.
Launch Windows Disk Management, take a screenshot of it showing all drives, and post it here.

Looks free and clear to me, but it never hurts to have a second opinion. I don't care about restoring it to the factory default. I will never sell it.

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Yep, that looks fine. Everything is booting off C:. That was not the case with my Dell laptop when I received it.

You could do what I did. I booted from USB with MiniTool Partition Wizard, and used that to delete the Dell Recovery partition and then allocate its space. In my case, I repartitioned the drive into three partitions, one for OS (C:) and two for data.

MiniTool Partition Wizard is a free tool that works well. But, be safe: first create a full disk mode backup; and read the instructions on how to use Partition Wizard and check everything before committing the changes.