It's a good idea to back up if you don't want to take any chances, but if you don't care about the recovery partition, you can just delete it without affecting anything else in Windows 7.

Just make sure you have a good backup in case you ever want to reinstall Windows.

Billyray520 may have been thinking you wanted to try a clean install of Windows.

So if I delete that recovery partition, Windows 7 will just slide that 25 GB into my other partition on the same drive?

Sorry if that's a stupid question, I just don't want to end up having an empty 25 GB partition.

Actually, that's a good question that I'm not exactly sure about now that you mention it.

I did some testing below with my G75VW Win7 unit which has C, D, and a recovery partition.
Sorry, I didn't want to delete my recovery partitioin yet, but Win7 Disk Management gives you the options to shrink and extend disk volumes which wasn't available in WinXP from what I remember (people may have used 3rd Party utilities like 'Partition Magic' to resize partitions in XP without losing data).

Anyway, I 'shrunk' my 😧 drive using Win7 Disk Management which created some 'unallocated'/free space, but there wasn't an option to add the free space to the C: drive for some reason.
My only options were to create a new 'E' drive, or return the space back to my 😧 drive, so it may not be that straightforward.

Also, I couldn't even find a way to delete my recovery partition with Disk Management, so you might see the same thing if you look into it more, but you should be able to delete it with a Windows Installation disk or maybe other ways. Your options for the free space might be limited though if you don't want to create a new 25Gb partition.

If you have another Win7 system around (?) that you can practice with, it should make things a little more clear.

Well, hope I'm not confusing you, but we may need to get more suggestions or look into this more to answer your question if you are seeing similar problems.

I should have taken your experiment and left it at that. I deleted that partition and as you I could not extend my existing partition so unless somebody else has some suggestions on this I guess I'm stuck with an empty 25 GB partition at least until Windows screws up again to where I have to reformat the drive but I don't care to do that anytime soon since I've already done it four times in the past seven days.

Update:

I found a software program called partition Wizard that has a free for home users version. So I gave it a try:
the end result is that I managed to recover almost all of the 25 GB from the recovery drive. I say almost because the amount that it left behind (although minimal) has still left at least some behind. A total of 109 MB to be exact.

So I deleted that 109 MB partition (Made it unallocated space) just so that it doesn't show up As another drive in Windows Explorer window.

I don't know what the limitations are to this partition Wizard but it did what I needed it to do which was to resize my primary C Dr. and not lose the data.

Thanks,
Adam

Adam, glad to hear you found a solution and thanks for the update.
- Albert

The reason I suggested reinstalling Windows 7 is so that you could have the full correct system setup. IOW, Windows 7 will create a 100MB system recovery partition along with the main system partition. That recovery partition is very handy for running "restore" command if you can't get Windows 7 to boot for some reason. Also it comes in handy if you use the Windows 7 backup utility which also creates system images. If you ever need to restore an image file, you can do so by booting into that system recovery partition. Lastly, you can execute Windows 7 commands from the recovery partition like fixmbr and similar things. I would still recommend you reinstall Windows 7 correctly, with the regular 100mb recovery partition and the full system partition. 🙂