Upgrade or clean install

[paradox183]

My T500 has Vista Business 64-bit. I plan to do a clean install of Windows 7 Professional 64-bit once I get my upgrade disk.

Is it ok to delete and reclaim the Lenovo service partition (S:) when I do this? I think the Lenovo web site says it contains startup information for the computer, but if I'm doing a clean install of a new OS then maybe none of that matters, right? I can't imagine that anything mission-critical would be handled outside of the BIOS, but I just wanted to make sure before I potentially brick my computer.

I know it's only 1.5GB but I have a 64GB SSD and every GB counts (really wish I'd gotten the 128GB now). I've already reclaimed the recovery partition.

[pipspeak]

I'm a little confused by the S partition as well. AFAIK the Q partition is the one that contains all the recovery data for whatever OS was factory installed on your machine (in this case Vista). I don't think it serves any other purpose, so as long as your have recovery discs for Vista and an OS disc for Win7 there's no harm in deleting it altogether -- you will just have to do a factory restore from the discs instead for using the Rescue and Recovery pre-boot utility.

The S partition is the boot loader partition that enables the machine to boot into the Q partition for a recovery is necessary. But if the Q partition is gone, does the S serve any purpose at all?