When I go into Administrative Tools/Computer Management/Disk Management, I see that besides the 2 volumes that I have, I see a third partition with volume name "Recovery" and the status says "Unknown Partition". It takes up 1.76GB. I was wondering if it is safe to delete such partition and merge it with my other ones using Partition Magic to get more HD space.

On my Compaq computer a partition says
System_sav for a name, and Healthy for status.

If yours is a FAT32 file system partition, and
XP is on NTFS partition, then it may be saved system files for restoring your computer to factory condition. Like my Recovery CD will need
that partition. HP owns Compaq now.

My computer is a laptop. I initially had all my partitions FAT32 and I converted them to NTFS. If I really dont care abt recovery, is it still safe to delete the Recovery partition and merge it to one of the two with Partition Magic?

Well I will say that I had to buy(was cheap) other CDs to place XP on a new HDD, and have Recovery partition. My computer does not use the
Recovery partition at all, for normal operation of the OS. So my guess is it is Safe to delete.

Wait about a day or so for replies from others.

Thanks for the information Chuck2.

That is system recovery partition.