My first thought was you could burn the Recovery Partition to CD's.
According to Gateway you can do this for programs and drivers:
http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache...k&cd=5&gl=us#2
However this does not cover the operating system itself.
You could most likely order Recovery disks from Gateway then delete this partition altogether.
Otherwise there is most likely a line in the BOOT.INI to trigger this drive from the proper prompt.
So unless you can find the specific line and then edit the BOOT.INI it will most likely want to boot D: for Recovery.
You would need to edit that line to say boot X: for Recovery.