[dba-Tech] Norton!

Many of the major manufacturers do that. Some of them also have a backup
solution which places system snapshots and backups of personal files on that
partition. However, this is of little comfort if the hard drive goes down as
the partitions go with it.

If you have the recovery disks you don't need the HD based recovery option.
And since you should make backups on another source of media I suggest you
do that and then use Partition Manager to merge the recovery (or whatever
they call it) partition it into your main partition. On some systems this
will double your main partition!

I'm doing this to an Acer Aspire at this moment.

HTH
John B