Just to clear things up that partition holds the recovery environment, and is only created if the drive does not have an existing partition. If a partition is present the recovery environment is created in a directory labeled "recovery" in the root of the drive. This recovery directory does not get wiped if you do an upgrade or clean install(without formatting) and will keep the WinRe.wim from all previous builds thus increasing in size with each new build. If your concerned about space take ownership of the recovery directory and delete older WinRe.wim's, or format before you install a new build.
That partition does not ALWAYS contain the recovery environment. Install will put it on the C: partition if you don't allow it to create partitions the way it wants to. Also that partition will be created regardless of the prior existence of partition(s) on the drive with the possible exception of scenarios where creating it would exceed the maximum number of primary partitions on a fixed MBR disk -- 4. I routinely (as in every time a new build comes out) use install to delete the 100/200MB system partition and my boot partition (C
and direct the installer to use the free space created by their deletion. My data partition (D
on the same drive holding my userprofile remains present and unchanged across every install. Install creates both the 100/200MB system partition as well as the boot partition where it installs Windows 7. Upon first login, before I do ANYTHING else, I
1) enable the default Administrator account
2) logout
3) login as Administrator
4) use User control panel to delete the account the install forced me to create along with it's entire profile
5) change HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList\ProfilesDirectory to d:\
6) use User control panel to create a new account for myself
7) rename the old userprofile directory on D:
8) logout of Administrator
9) login as the new account
10) disable administrator and restore the default value of the ProfilesDirectory key
11) delete the administrator profile
12) run a script I have to move relevant files from the old renamed userprofile to the newly created one -- it then deletes the old essentially empty userprofile and reinstalls all my core applications.
I know all of this by rote as I've done it as many times as there have been leaked builds since the middle of last year.
