Recovery partition-can this HD be removed and later reinstalled?

[vicbiver]

My HP Pavilion came with a a 4 GB HD Recovery Partition.
Can I remove that HD and install a bigger one so that I have more disk space? Then if I need it for a recovery, reinstall the Recovery HD? or is this something that gets updated on a daily basis?
I know that with IDE the max was 2 HD, so I'm assuming the same with SATA?
Thanks.

 

[paulstorey]

I havent seen the new HP Pavilions but a lot of the older ones you could actually burn the recovery data to CDs (there was a utility in the program files to do it). Also you may be able to order the recovery cds from hp for a postage fee, in which case you will never need that drive again. (these are always useful to have anyway in case u get a drive failiure and dont have them)

As far as i am aware this setup will still be standard and nothing gets changed in the partition (it just holds a copy of the cds basically)

The SATA controller will support one drive per channel (you cant daisy chain like ide)

 

[vicbiver]

Thank you for your reply.
I actually do have a set of recovery CDs that I was prompted to make when I first turned the machine on (about a year ago).
So what you are saying is that the recovery HD is static, and I could just lay it aside until needed and replace it with one that I can actually use.

 

[edfair]

I suspect, but can't be certain, that the recovery stuff needs to be in the exact same position on whatever boot drive you have to be able to use it as designed. So a larger hard drive would need to be prepared by something like ghost that can maintain partitions.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[micker377]

Remember: a recovery disk will return the system back to the state it was in when the disk was created. ANY program changes made since then will be lost. By the way, why do you say that two IDE drives were the "max"? You can run as many IDE peripherals (up to 26), as you have the power supply to support. Two IDE ports with two drives on each one. Add-in cards allow four more each card. Between CD,DVD,ZIP(!) and hard drives, I'm running six drives internally.