Hey folks-

I’m thinking about blowing away my hard drive and starting over.  Was wondering if there was any reason why i care about the 5GB hidden partition.  I’d like to blow that away as well and have reclaim that space which seems to me like a big-fartin waste of precious GBs.

I’ve made the recovery disks, as well as have plenty of WinXP discs laying around.  I’d like to use those since they come prepackaged with SP2 and the rest of the updates. 

I don’t care about any of the other crap that sony packages with the CD excpet for the drivers/program for the camera and the buttons on the side; and i’m assuming i can download these from somewhere.

Is there something i’m not thinking about?

If you made recovery discs you shouldn’t need that 5GB partition.  When I reinstalled my computer I reclaimed that 5GB for my own use and just used the recovery CDs.  Needless to say I didn’t have any problems with that small 5GB partition missing.

Once I was sure I wasn’t going to have to return my TR3, I ordered the recovery DVD from Sony and blew that partition away.

5GB is a lot on a 40GB drive to have wasted on something you don’t need.  I am not sure why Sony just didn’t provide the recovery DVD with the computer and not hide that 5GB.  Surely the DVD isn’t that expensive.  I have never understood the “hidden recovery partition” philosophy.

How do you get the 5GB back for your own use?

If you’re going to re-install windows, just do a full install. You will have an opportunity to repartition the disk. The 5G is a hidden partition.

If you don’t want tore-install, you can use a program such s Partition Magic.

Neither is hard, but things do go wrong sometimes. Backup your data first.