The Recovery Partition and little Dell diagnostic partition may have been working on the newly cloned drive, but certainly weren't after resizing and adding partitions, so both those partitions were basically just sitting there taking up space, except for one important thing: The 11GB Recovery Partition is an active system partition, contains the boot files, and Win7 will not boot without it unless you make some changes. Since I have 2 1TB drives, and do my own regular scheduled backups, I wanted to get these partitions off my drive. Here is what I did:
1. To be safe, I made backup images of all partitions, just in case it didn't work.
2. I downloaded and burned BootIt NG (AKA BING). Note: You cannot install BING in Win7. You just burn it to a bootable CD/DVD by clicking the makedisk.exe from the unzipped files.
3. From Win7, open Regedit, under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, unload BCD00000000 from
the registry by highlighting it, click File/Unload Hive, Yes - or the following boot files will be in use and won't copy. (Note: If you don't have BCD00000000 under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, which was the case for me, just proceed to the next step.)
4. In Disk Management, right click the Recovery partition, click Change Drive Letter and Paths..., click Add, dot in Assign the following drive letter, OK.
5. In Folder and search options, View tab, put a dot in "Show hidden files, folders and drives". Also, remove the tick from "Hide protected operating system files (Recommended)". OK.
6. In Computer, Recovery partition, open and copy the "Boot" folder and "bootmgr" and paste them into the C: drive. (Copy, do not Move these files)
7. In Folder and search options, View tab, put a tick in "Hide protected operating system files (Recommended)". OK.
8. In Disk Management, right click the Recovery Partition, click Change Drive Letter and Paths..., click Remove, Yes.In Disk Management, right click the C: drive, click Mark Partition as Active, Yes.
9. Restart the computer with a BING CD in the drive. If necessary, set boot order to boot from CD drive first.) In BING (Partition Work), delete the Recovery partition (and the other little diagnostic partition, if you want to). You can also move and resize partitions to use the new space, or do this later with your own partition software.
10. In BING, do a BCD Edit on Win7. Follow instructions at http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/kb/article.php?id=318
11. Reboot
This method worked perfectly for me, and it's not as difficult at all once you get started and follow all the instructions carefully. I hope this helps others who want to remove these partitions.
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