[DaveSS]

Hi Folks,

I have a 5GB of Recovery partition placed on my one drive with Vista, I want the space and have no need for the Recovery section. Primarily I would just like to Format it as its the correct size for the dual boot I want to instal. Unfortuatnley windows tells me it is not possible to format the drive. (D

I have deleted everything on it and still it refuses to be formated.

I have seen this issue of recovery partitions come up before and trail off.

Anyone got a solution that will not confuse Vista?

[DaveA]

Did you burn the System DVD's before deleting the files from the partition?

What is the size of the hard drive?

[DaveSS]

ITs 80 GB. I have VISTA DVD and all the drivers needed from Sony. I think I have it sussed. Sony put on a protection to the drive. From what I can gather from this article

http://www.pocketables.net/2006/07/reclaiming_what.html

Am about to try it now....

[DaveSS]

Nope it says again it cannot be deleted as it may be nessessary for the operation of the system!! it is not apart of the friggin system its an empty space!!

Have managed to delete the contents.It says there are 55MB remaining and I cannot see it anywhere, not hidden files not nothing

Stuck again

[DaveSS]

It is listed as a boot volume, I think this is the issue. Yet I boot from C. Any ideas on how to disable this?

[DaveSS]

Tried Fdisk, "System Disk is not allowed to be formatted" That's the problem alright

Any Ideas?

[DaveSS]

Right I tried G parted on D and it reformatted it.

VISTA did not boot. An error about kernal missing popped up. So I am guessing Sony in all their wisdom put something on D: that was booting the system on C:

The whole purpose on this was to aid in installing a dual boot with ubuntu and vista.

Taking this into account I installed ubuntu 8 onto D: using a manual partition and letting it decide where to put the boot loader.

It did not see or allow any windows user settings to be imported so I assumed it did not see it at all.

Then on restart I saw Vista loader and it worked. Now got dual boot working with no more Sony inspired D:

Rather than save 20 cents on a CD to some with an already expensive laptop they went for this common recovery drive which is a complete pain in arse to me. I have a back up, even online storage with all. My laptop came with 80GB HD and yet i only had 65 GB in reality after Vista consumed so much and then the 5GB recovery partition. If Sony had just stated 75GB HD Availible or the like it would not have pissed me off so much. But they didn't. So I kicked it out. And reclaimed what I paid for.

I hope this helps other Sony users. My advice to those not wanting to Dual boot and just get rid of D: is to either wipe D: out with file manager settings, and then use Vista to resize it. Reclaim the unallocated space and leave D: as a small 50MB boot partition.

Either that or delete D: with gparted as above, and then use Vista recovery disk to reinstal the MBR boot loader on C:

Case closed