Recovery Partition.... necessity?

[minersrevolt]

So on this PC (running xp) It came with the factory default recovery partition. I have all of the driver's and everything I would need to reinstall windows if it became necessary.

What I am planning on doing is dual booting XP and Ubuntu, I have set this up before. But since I can only have 4 Primary Partitions on the Hard Drive, I would need to remove this recovery partition in order to fit (NTFS, SWAP, FAT32, EXT3).

What I am concerned about is if I remove this partition, and have problems in the future making me re-install Windows, would I not be able to re-install without this partition... Do I have to have this on the computer to install windows?

I realize this is a Linux forum, but as Linux users have a technical aptitude I figured you all would know the answer to this...

Thanks!

[thedondj]

It depends if they gave you a proper windows cd or just a recovery cd. If it's just a recovery one then you will need that partition to reinstall as the cd will just run a program to copy from the partition.

Also if it's anything like the cd i got with my laptop it will delete all your linux partitions when you use it and fill your hard-drive with windows again.

Actually, you might want to ignore that, just been assured that I'm wrong and that most recovery cds or provided as an alternative to the hd based recovery.

[devils casper]

What I am planning on doing is dual booting XP and Ubuntu, I have set this up before. But since I can only have 4 Primary Partitions on the Hard Drive, I would need to remove this recovery partition in order to fit (NTFS, SWAP, FAT32, EXT3).

Unlike Windows, Linux does not care about Partition Type and you can install Linux in Logical Partition too. You can create 63 Logical Partitions in a Hard Disk.
Create one Primary Partition for Windows and create an Extended Partition out of whole free space. Create Logical Partitions inside Extended.

[minersrevolt]

Thanks for responding,

What I did was delete the partition using GPart and did not install linux. When rebooting the computer it said it could not find the OS, even though I still had Windows installed. I then tried adding the boot flag to the NTFS partition, still no luck.

So, with that said, I went into GPart using the LiveCD again, and created one large NTFS partition across the whole HD. Re-installed windows, then using the live CD created the seperate partitions mentioned earlier.

I then installed Ubuntu and all is well.

What I was originally worried about however was true, deleting this recovery partition crippled windows and I had to complete reformat the harddrive to get it functional again.

So the moral of the story, if you don't want to have to complete re-install your OS DONT DELETE YOUR RECOVERY PARTITION. I must say however, now I have an additional 10GB of space =D

Thanks for your responses.

[smolloy]

Reinstalling Windows probably wasn't necessary, as you probably just confused the bootloader by removing a partition it expected to be there. I'm sure there is a way to have fixed this, but as you have reinstalled, I guess that's academic now!

[scm]

In your situation, and assuming there was room in the case, I'd have installed a second hard disk and put linux on that.