Windows 7: Can I delete the healthy (recovery partition)?

I would just format your whole hard drive and delete accordingly in the Windows 7 setup. Reinstall and have a nice fresh install of windows. Install necessary programs and create an image.



And yes. You can use it in the future. Whatever you install before you make the image is what will be there when you load back the image.

If you make a backup DVD from the recovery partition, that is exactly the same system as it was when your PC came out of the box - only the default stuff installed (including some of the bloat). But the programs you downloaded, you will have to install again.
You can, however, also make image DVDs with an imaging program (Macrium, Ghost, Acronis, etc.) after you installed everything and did all the system settings and tweaks. That image will then reflect the system as it was when you took the image. If you want to do that only once, DVDs may be OK. But for constant imaging (I do that every second day), an external disk is much more practical.

That partition at the front is your Windows 7 and mfgr utitlities partition which is meant to be used to do a full restore to the original state of your machine when it was produced by the mfgr.

Whether you remove the partition or not is your choice. There are pros and cons. I will not touch that question but I will tell you that with DiskPart you can 100% reclaim that space but you will not be able to extend your normal C: to include that area.

The 100 mb at the tailend you can reclaim with DiskPart. Once again you will get pro and con arguments as to whether to actually take the step. Since I have the Recovery Environment on a bootable DVD and on a bootable USB Flash Drive, then I always reclaim that 100 mb and extend my "c:" to include that space.

On your "c:" is a \recovery folder which contains a subfolder with winre.wim and boot.sdi. The .wim file is your system repair program that you normally reach via f8 at computer startup time. the .sdi file is a system deployment image file whose purpose is to prepare a ntfs-formatted disk in ram so that the recovery environment runs from ram.

Windows 7 offers via control panel, and backup and restore which can backup your entire disk. This program produces a VHD file which, if you desire, you can "Mount" and then extract files from if some unforeseen disaster occurs. You can also do a 100% restore of your hard disk using the backup make by the Backup and Restore program. I have tested the full and the partial backup capabilities built-in to Windows 7 and also the restore from these backups. Very slick and easy to use.

Wow, I didn't know there were many ways to back up the system. Well, I still don't but am little better .

I have always reinstalled OS to get rid of bloatwares when I got new computers. Only this time it doesn't come with OS cd. I had to download from digitalriver, I thought it didn't work, but it does. And I used it to repair after deleting 100 MB and 12GB claimed above.

I thought the only way to get the whole thing back after deleted bloat ware, install software, programs is clone hard drive. Now I learn that back up image can too.

Imaging is actually the easiest route. look at this little tutorial I made, you will be in business 1, 2, 3. It is very, very easy. But do yourself a favor and use an external disk. DVDs are too messy.

Thanks for the link. Will down load and work on this weekend.

no problem, any time.

DL software and made a disk image. My C drive is about 18gb but the disk image is about half (8gb and some). Is it right? I thought the image's capacity should be as same as the original's. May be I made some mistakes. The instruction is pretty forward.

That's ok. The image is compressed to save disk space. My images are also only about half the original.
If you are brave, pull the image in to test whether it works. I always make that test - but first on a little test partition that I create for the purpose - usually a 3GB partition into which I move some data (anything), then I image, then I delete some of the data, then I pull the image in. If my deleted data is back, I know it worked.
Just another little hint. You can open the image file and look what's in it. But that will mount a volume that you can see in Computer. Do not worry about it, it will disappear with the next reboot (and if you open the image 3 times, you will see 3 volumes, but they are virtual).

I created an image and saved it in usb external hard drive.

When computer crashed, how can I run Macrium to restore image back to computer?