Hardware Drivers :: How To Merge Primary Partitions With Recovery Partition

I just bought a new laptop - an ASUS N550JV - with a single 1TB hard drive. I specifically sought a 1TB hard drive because I intend to store a lot of photos on the laptop and already have over 600GB of photo data to store.

When I got the laptop the first thing I did was to go through the windows update process to get everything up to date, then I upgraded to Windows 8.1 (the laptop came with Windows 8), then I ran the windows update again until everything was up to date.

It was only then that I opened up file explorer with the intention of setting up a basic folder structure for the files I planned to transfer to the laptop. I was dissapointed, at that point, to discover that instead of a single 1TB C: drive, I saw a 370+ GB C: drive and a 530GB + D drive. I confirmed with system information that there is indead just a single drive, and that it thus came partitioned into 2 primary volumes (which, btw, still don't add up to 1TB BTW!). This setup really doesn't work for me, because the "larger" volume is still too small for all my photos, and it would be illogical and inconvenient to have to split up the photos so that some were on the C drive and some on the D drive.

Could I somehow merge the two partitions back into one primary drive, or at least re-size them so that the D drive had at least, say, 750GB, and shrink the C drive accordingly. He pointed me to the Disk Management utility and directed me to delete the (still empty) D drive, which would make that storage space unallocated, then extend the C drive to use that unalocated space. I was able to delete the D drive, and confirmed that there was now 530+ GB of unallocated space. However, when I click on the C drive the option to extend is greyed out.

I did a bit of Googling at this point and discovered that you can can only extend to contiguous unallocated space, and the unallocated space was NOT contiguous - there is a 350MB "Recovery Partition" between the C and D (or unallocated) spaces. In fact, there were multiple recovery and other partitions. (From left to right: 100MB "EFI System Partition", 900MB "Recovery Partition", 370+GB "Primary" C Drive with Boot etc, 350MB "Recovery Partition", 530+GB "Primary" D drive, and 20+GB "Recovery Partition").

Of course I would be too scared to delete the recovery partition, but there's no option to do so anyway ...

I asked the family member again and he suggested creating a USB Recovery Drive and, in the process, wipe the recovery partition. So used the windows utility to create a recovery drive, and sure enough, at the end it asked if I wanted to delete the recovery partition and I said yes. The good news is that this removed the 20GB partition, and I was able to extend the D drive to use that newly unallocated space. The bad news is that the 350MB recovery partition still lies between the C and D drives, preventing me from merging the two.

Again through Googling I found that there are tools I could use to force delete the recovery partition, but I'm afraid to do so and kill my computer or recovery options all together. I also heard that this 350MB recovery partition was created when I upgraded to 8.1, and that rolling back to my factory setting won't remove the partition?

So the question is, what can I do? Is there an easy way to "move" the recovery partition to the end of the drive without breaking any functionality that it might have? What would happen to my computer if this recovery partition were to "break" or get removed? Is it best that I just "live with it" the way it is despite the inconvenience?