delete recovery console problems

Hello,

I recently upgraded the internal hard drive on my Hewlett-Packard computer, from a 40GB WD with 18GB used( out of over 30 total) on C: partition, and 5GB (out of 6GB avaiable) on D: (Recovery)partition. I used disk imaging software from Acronis True Image 9 for this purpose. It went very smoothly. After cloning, the new hard drive and all of the programs and operating system truly seemed absolutely identical except of course there was now more unused space. And everything ran perfectly except for one item, the recovery console. The computer did not come with a Windows XP disk, but instead came with a partition ( D: ) which is dedicated to a recovery program. I was allowed, while setting up the computer, to make one copy of this partition to CDs, which I did. But HP/MS would only allow one copy.

The Acronis software moved both partitions to the new hard drive giving them exactly proportional hard drive space. So far so good, and now I had a 16GB D: partition, of which 5GB was being by the Recovery Console, 11GB available. Except that the recovery partition is now nonfunctional. So I worked with Acronis tech support for a while on this, with the end result being that I was informed this was not a problem with the Acronis software, and that I needed to contact Microsoft for a solution. I finally said to heck with this, this recovery partition is not worth all the work. I have the recovery partition copied on CDs, and I can also get a copy from Hewlett-Packard if I had to. Plus I have the entire C: with OS and all programs "imaged" to DVD by Acronis. So I decided I wanted to free up the space in the recovery partition so that I could use it for something else.

But I should point out something else that was weird about the cloned partition. In Windows Explorer, it looked just like it did on the old computer. And when I would right click on it and select properties, it showed the same 5 GB of information on the partition, just as was on the old hard drive. But I could not get any individual files to show up on this recovery partition. If I moved the folder called "recovery" off of the D: partition, so that no files remain on D:\, the part that I was able to move only showed a few kilobytes. The seemingly blank space on the disk partition still showed 5 GB, with 11 GB of free space available on that partition. Anyway, I move the "recovery" back to the partition like it had been. I thought about formatting this partition, which was an option when I right clicked on it. But then I got to reading about the "HP PC recovery tools CD", and proceeded to burn a copy of this utility. So following some instructions that I had, I put the CD in, and select "remove system recovery partition".

Everything seems to go very smoothly, I reboot, and presto -- no more recovery partition, no more D:/Recovery. Only now a new weird problem has arisen, naturally enough. All of a sudden my remaining C: partition has increased the amount of used space from 18.7 GB to 32 GB out of 120GB total avaiable! And virtually all of it appears to be in My Documents folder, which has gone from about 1 GB to 18 GB! And here is the really weird part: just like with the originally troublesome recovery partition, even though it shows this massive new amount of information in My Documents, I can not see any new files/folders when looking at the contents of My Documents. As far as I can tell by looking at it, it looks like about the same amount of files and folders, and I don't really see any new ones. Everything looks pretty familiar. And yet, it has gone from 1 GB to 18! So I'm thinking about trying this now: backing up any new files in My Documents, that is new since I made the last backup from My Documents, then deleting all of the contents of the 18 GB My Documents folder, and restoring the My Documents backup from a few days ago, when it was still about 1 GB.

Any thoughts on whether or not the above will work, and any thoughts on why such craziness is taking place? I also have the option of restoring a full disk C: partition image which was made with Acronis just a day before. Also, I had planned to use the same "Windows recovery CD" for the purpose of adding a new partition, but I figure I will wait till I get this other craziness sorted out.

Thanks in advance for any help,

Bill

PS: Excuse my error- My Documents has not been increased from 1 GB to 18 GB, as I stated above, but rather from 1 to 13.8 gigabytes. Which is very close to the size allotted to the partition which I removed using the "HP PC recovery tools CD".

HP a324x
Windows XP Home SP2
mem 1024MB
AMD Athlon 2600+, 2.133GHz
Int.HD Seagate 7200.9 Barracuda 120MB( spare int. WD40GB)
CD writer, DVD ROM, Ext. Memorex 8X DVD writer