Can I delete it? Can I burn it to CD somehow so I can release the partition?

Umm.. apparently yes you can.

As you were.

I’ve got an image of mine stored (for use on a memory stick – no optical drive here), but kept the partition anyway – are you that short of disc space?

I’m shaving off the end of my disk to install a personal OS on a work laptop. It’s only going to be small, so the extra 15Gb will help. Turns out Lenovo have a utility for creating the installation media which I am now running 🙂

As an aside,

You could resize the system partition too, if needs be. Linux boot disk (google ‘gparted live cd’). Top tip, get rid of the swap file and hibernate file temporarily first.

Alternatively, VMWare?

See earlier thread, I successfully used VirtualBox to run a VM from an external drive, but it was a bit slow really although cool. I think I’ll use this partition for OS and the few apps I want, and put data on the external drive. Considering installing the apps on the external drive too, I don’t think it’ll cock things up if I try and boot without the drive present – only if I try and run the apps.

What do you mean by resize the system partition? There was only one on this machine. Are yo talking about the one labelled ‘system’? Cos that’s only 1.17Gb and is right at the beginning. I guess that’s why I was able to resize C:

The creation of recovery media is taking for flippin ever though and I want to go to bed.

I meant the C:\ drive, yes. You should be able to shrink it to create free space, which you can then repartition to hold your alternate OS.

I did that, whilst using it. I just feel like deleting this useless appendix.

However this is taking forever, it’s asking me for the THIRD bloody DVD, and I want to go to bed.

As an aside,

I got a new Lenovo for work yesterday to replace a very past-its-best Dell.

Ordinarily I’d have swapped the hard disks or cloned it before returning it to internal IT so I have a backup. Instead this time, I used VMWare Converter to convert the running machine into a virtual disk, copied the image to the new lapdog, then used VMWare player there to fire it up. The old one then got DBANed.

So I still have my old laptop just in case I’ve forgotten to copy something off there, in its entirety and bootable, even though it no longer exists. In’t technology brilliant?! Cheesy peas.

Whoah. How very scifi.. exactly like in that Iain M Banks book. Can you VMify it in its running state? So you wouldn’t even have to shut it down?

On the subject of VMs, work now distribute VMs with various items of our software installed on them for use at clients, to save us having to install them all. Which is cool, and the reason I bought a 1TB portable drive…

What do you mean by resize the system partition? There was only one on this machine. Are yo talking about the one labelled ‘system’? Cos that’s only 1.17Gb and is right at the beginning. I guess that’s why I was able to resize C:

Assuming it works the same as on my Lenovo, the System partition isn’t actually the one with the OS on – it’s a special boot partition which enables the recovery options, and then boots through into the OS partition. Mine is also 1.17GB, so must be the same as yours.

In which case I presume Cougar was suggesting resizing the OS partition (strangely enough there does seem to be 488MB free space on the System one).

it’s asking me for the THIRD bloody DVD

Well what did you expect to backup what in my case is a 9.76GB partition (I doubt yours is less)? Creating a memory stick and then storing the image of that (it’s on my backup disk) is actually far easier!

I had read that someone tried making the image of the recovery partition (15Gb) and it wouldn’t work, so I thought I’d go down the official route.

Next job, install Windows 8 on it.

You misunderstand me – I created a recovery USB stick, and then stored the image of that (so that I could use the stick for other stuff until it was needed).