So far so good…
I’ve been annoyed for a while by my lack of disk space. Thinkpads don’t ship with recovery CDs. Instead, they devote about 5 GB of space on the hard drive to a hidden recovery partition. That’s a lot of space! I wanted it back. 
However, I was wary about doing it, knowing that the possibility for an error was high. I prepared by (a) creating a set of recovery discs, (b) creating an “Ultimate Boot CD”, and© doing a full backup. First those three steps:
Recovery Discs: On my computer, I went to Programs > Access IBM > Create Recovery Discs. This part was weird and I’m not sure that I did it 100% correctly. They say that it should take about 6 blank CDs. It made those first 6 CDs just fine… and then kept going, spitting out virtually blank CDs (which each had a single .ini file). Each of those .ini files indicated that it was not the last disc in the sequence, so my hope/plan is that if I ever need those discs, I’ll write a single new 7th CD which has the same .ini file… but says it’s the last in the sequence. Keep your fingers crossed for me that I’ll never need to use it!
Side note: if you make Recovery CDs, don’t lose them! Apparently you can only make one copy, ever. 
Here’s a web page I referenced, though it doesn’t say much more than what I’ve said.
Ultimate Boot CD: I’ve actually had my UBCD 4 Win for a while so I don’t recall the directions. It was a somewhat complicated process requiring a Windows XP CD (fortunately, I’d bought one a while back). The UBCD was what I used to repartition my drive, so if you have another solution you like, you can use that!
Full Backup: I’m still using Windows Backup for my backup/recovery needs. I don’t particularly like it, so if anyone has suggestions on a free alternative, let me know!
Doing the Deed
Now that I was ready, it was time to reclaim that partition! I want to preface this that this really probably shouldn’t be attempted by the faint of heart. I ended up with no major problems (yet), but it’s probably easy to make a mistake and give yourself a big computer problem.
I started by rebooting my computer and going into the Recovery Partition (press Access IBM or F11) during boot. I looked at all the menu options and chose Access BIOS which told me to reboot again and press F1 instead. Oh well.
In the BIOS, I went to Security > IBM Predesktop Area and switched it from Normal to Disabled, which allows the OS to see the area. It warned me that it was a rather stupid thing I was doing. I said, “Go ahead!”
Rebooted again into the UBCD4Win disk, which is a lovely little thing. I didn’t really know what I was looking to do… here’s a good place to be careful and read everything three times! I went into the Disk Management utility where I saw my whole drive with its 32 GB partition and the missing 5 GB partition. I deleted the 5 GB partition and then not knowing what to do, tried recreating it and reformatting it as NTFS. Reboot.
Operating System not detected. I hate those words. After freaking out a little, I decided to reboot into my UBCD. I noted that I hadn’t set my main drive to be the “active partition.” I switched it to C: (actually, I’d done that before) and set it as the active partition.
Then I thought, I really want a big drive, rather than a second smaller partition. I deleted the service area partition again and found another program called DiskPart. Command line without good instructions… Scary! “Help” worked, of course, so I started there.
I selected the correct disk, partition and volume (disk 0, partition 1, volume 1, in my case) and then asked it to give me the details of the volume to make sure I’d selected the right one. “Extend.” Phew! That seemed to work!
Reboot. Success! Or so it seems so far… I’ve tried a bunch of programs and most everything seems to be running well. I did have a minor casualty of a program called Magnifying Glass Pro that I got off of giveawayoftheday.com, but I count myself lucky.
If you’re doing this process too, I wish you the best! I’m glad the process is over for me!
Oh yeah. Here’s the other page that I referenced.
Good luck!
