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#11
The main advantage of keeping the recovery partition is that using it to recover your system to it's out-of-box state (which you might want to do if ever you sold the computer) is a lot quicker than using your recovery discs.
As WHS says though, it becomes academic if you create a complete system image for recovery purposes.
As a literal reply to your question, you can but only if you have the tools (OPK) that MS makes available only to OEMs and system builders. Its a long and reasonably complicated procedure and it makes sense only for the said parties because they need to sell win7 configured in a particular way. get over this recovery partition fetish- its the way HP or Dell or Lenovo thinks your OS should look like, not the way YOU want. Tweak and setup things the way you want, then create an image using Macrium or Acronis or whatever and you're set. BTW, Acronis creates this "secure zone"- a special, hidden partition on the hard disk for storing the image, very much like an OEM recovery partition.
If you have the Dell Recovery image DVD's, YES you can, but all added data will be lost.
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If you have Dell install DVD, NO.