Properly deleting Sony VAIO recovery partition

[QZTT]

Hello Sonystylers/VAIOers,

I am trying to encrypt my ENTIRE drive and the program cannot encrypt the entire drive because of irregular partitions of the HDD (Sony Recovery partition). I already created backup/recovery CDs and I have no use for the Recovery partition anymore and I would like that space to be available to me.

I have already scoured the internet for answers using Google and a slew of other search engines and to no avail, I have failed to find anything useful or of up to date.

Also as I was using Windows Defragmenter, I noticed there is a "System Reserved" partition in addition to the "Recovery Partition." What is that used for? Is it part of the Recovery partition?

[namaiki]

The 100MB system reserved partition is something to do with Windows startup. I don't think that you can delete it.

[baiii]

You can try use EasyBCD or other MBR software and write your MBR on your OS drive then you can remove "system reserved".
For the recovery partition,
you can either
make recovery disc if the software allows
clone it as a image or clone it on to a usb or
you think if you will never need it, you can just format it and call it a day

some googlefu will let do any of the option

[QZTT]

I found a solution today! You have to use the Diskpart CMD using the "delete partition override command" instead of the standard "delete partition."

However I have one more question.

I created Recovery Disks using VAIO Care. If I do need a recovery, are the recovery partition and recovery disks I created INTERDEPENDENT on each other? In other words, are the recovery disks useless without the parition and vice-versa?

[baiii]

nope, should work just by itself.

[baiii]

Nope, disc should work all my itself,other vaio owner should be able to confirm.

[beaups]

Don't delete it. Your recovery discs go bad all the time - I'd say they've worked 20% of the time for me. You're gonna regret deleting that partition.

[namaiki]

Haha.. Yeah, funny that yesterday when I tried to restore my system that disc 2 had gone funny, but I managed to make another copy that works; took an hour trying to read the disc in Nero.


But in theory, if the discs haven't gone bad, they will work independent of the recovery partition on the hard disk and also by default will restore the recovery partition when you reimage the computer from them.

[QZTT]

Just finished deleting the recovery partition and gained an extra 10 gigabytes! I will now be able to encrypt my ENTIRE HARDDRIVE without any warnings or compromise.

I will post the process I used to recover those precious gigabytes later on because I am confident that I am not the only one that was curious on how to delete the partition.