Do I need my recovery partition?

So, I have an A150 120Gb HD running XP Home. Thanks to this forum it now boots up reliably and is sporting the v3305 BIOS (it lasted a few weeks before dying and had V3114, so thanks for that!). I have a USB DVD drive and an OEM XP Home DVD (which I used to put XP on my Mac using Boot Camp). I have copies of all of the driver files from Acer on my Mac and could put them onto a CD / USB Drive / USB Hard Drive easily enough. Presumably I could use the XP Home DVD to restore my Aspire One via the USB Drive and could dispense with the eRecovery software and reclaim a few extra gigabytes of drive space. Sensible or stupid? If sensible, how do I go about it given that I can't do anything to the recovery partition using the XP Disk Management Utility (options to delete partition not shown) and cannot find out how to uninstall the eRecovery software? Back in the days of 20Gb hard drives I managed to get rid of Gateway's recovery software and reclaim the drive space, but Acer seem to be making it more difficult...

 

Well I for one would not get rid of my recovery partition. The reason being if you ever have an issue with your One and you contact Acer for tech support..haha...they may ask you to restore your Windows installation via eRecovery before proceeding with support. If you have your own installation of XP they may not support you. Thats my own personal experience with Acer.

I use Partiton Magic a lot and its ideal for removing those hidden restore partitions. Deleting your recovery partition will give you approx 5g of HDD space.

 

Thanks. I guess i'll hold off until I get pushed for HD space. Given that i'll only gain 5 Gb HD space and I can get a couple of 8Gb SD cards hanging onto the partition may still be worth it. I've never found manufacturer support much help; forums like this are usually much more helpful!