Shrinking windows and recovery partitions on the samsung new series 9

Question

I just bought a samsung NP900X3C, and as I was going to install linux, I noticed the windows partitions and recovery partitions occupied a major portion of the disk.

The disk is a 128 GB SSD, and I want to keep the windows partition in order to play some games once in a while, but the windows disk is already 45GB full (with no installed programs) and the recovery partition is 20GB. That leaves under 60 GB for linux, which is not optimal, since that is what I'm going to be using most of the time, and there would be no room for games on the windows partition.

There are also two small partitions that I don't know what are doing, one 100mb at the start of the disk that I'm guessing is some kind of boot partition, and one 5GB, that is described as an OS/2 hidden C: drive

What I'm wondering is: can i delete the recovery partition? What about the mystical 5gb partition?

Here is what fdisk reports:

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 128.0 GB, 128035676160 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 15566 cylinders, total 250069680 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x83953ffc

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *        2048      206847      102400    7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda2          206848   198273023    99033088    7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda3       198273024   207276031     4501504   84  OS/2 hidden C: drive
/dev/sda4       207276032   250068991    21396480   27  Hidden NTFS WinRE

Answer 1

/dev/sda1 is definitely the Windows Boot Partition, if you delete it, your Windows won't boot. If you have the Windows CD then you can reinstall the bootloader on the system partition. Deleting the recovery Partition is safe if you are able to reinstall Windows by your own or if you make a recovery with CloneZilla. Note that after reinstalling Windows, your Linux won't boot so you will have to reinstall the linux bootloader. As to the OS/2 Partition I don't have any clue, but it would probably be save to delete it.

Independend of what you are going to do I recommend you making a backup of the whole hard drive with CloneZilla before.