Got shiny new HP PC from HQ.
Problem is, it has a recovery partition that has a big warning not to touch from HP when opened. I have to hide this so I don't damage it by accident; also it`s an eyesore.
After googling around... I got this:
Click Start, type diskmgmt.msc, press Enter and wait for Disk Management
to load. When it does, right-click directly on the recovery partition
so it becomes the selected one, then select "Change Drive Letter and
Paths..."
On the next dialogue box that appears, click Remove. You'll get a warning box like this:
Click Yes, and from that moment on (you should close any open Explorer windows and re-open them) neither Windows (aka Explorer) nor applications will be able to "see" the recovery partition - you've effectively hidden it from pretty much anything except Disk Management itself.
This keeps the recovery/restore partition intact, "protects" it since nothing can access it (the OS and apps require a drive letter being assigned to access partitions), and you're good to go.
Just as a sidenote: while deleting the partition can recover some extra space on a drive, the issue that most people have nowadays is they put too much on hard drives. One should never ever fill a hard drive more than 85% full, regardless of OS or file system. I can't even begin to tell you how many machines come to me for repairs/tuneups/optimization/reinstalls and they're 90, sometimes 95% full and the performance of the entire machine suffers drastically for it.
If you're so pressed for space you have to actually delete the recovery/restore partition, it's simple: you've got too much stuff on the drive already and should either back material up to another location (and delete it off the drive to recover space), or get another hard drive and move stuff over. But keep that ~85% full figure in your head and do your best not to ever go past that point.
Windows (and all modern OSes) work best when the OS "has room to breathe" aka free space. When you severely reduce the amount of available free space on a system, you're essentially choking it and performance will suffer because the OS can't find storage space when it needs it.
If you do decide to delete the recovery/restore partition, ensure - and I mean triple-check if necessary - that you've created those backup/recovery/restore DVDs before removing the partition.
Hope this helps...
The solution is from here.
edit: and while at it... I found users keep repeating to do some backup with free tool Macrium, and whs from sevenforums.com create nice tutorial.