My apologies as I thought that the almost 15 gig partition sda3, was D drive & you are most likely right that it may be the recovery partition. That's why before I start I backup my systems & any of my friends system in multiple fashions, full disk image & partition for partition.

I too had the same problem with a new HP laptop.
sda1 was a System partition
sda2 was Windows 7 partition
sda3 was a Recovery image partition
sda4 was the HP Tools partition

No room for another primary partition for Linux. My solution was to use the HP Tools utility to make a set of recovery DVD's, so then I no longer needed the Recovery image partition. First task, delete all the bloatware that just takes up disk space. Then I used the Windows 7 utilities to modify the disk partitions, first to delete the recovery partition (D, then to defrag the entire disk, then to shrink the Windows partition. I started with a 500 GB drive, and was only able to shrink Windows down to 210, even though it was a brand new machine with nothing on it except what came from the factory, but this still left me 255 GB for the new Linux partition.

Then use the Linux installer (I used Mint 10) to create an extended partition in the new free space. I created a 6GB swap partiton and a 249 GB ext3 partition, and the install completed without any problems. Some people recommend a third (or more) extended partition for saving data to, so you may want to pursue that route, but it's not absolutely necessary. Depends upon your backup strategy, I suppose.

The machine dual boots now, but I can't remember the last time I booted into Windows. This is my first Linux machine and I love it. Don't miss Windows at all, except that Netflix won't stream to a Linux OS. Other than that, it does everything as well or better than I was used to doing in Windows.

One thing to make sure if keeping Windows on the computer is keep it as the first partition. So make sure your first partition is in NTFS format. DOS is configured to have to run at the beginning of any hard drive it exists on. Check that but otherwise, I'm not the best at partitioning.

thesatellitethatcould,

This may be what M$ wishes but its systems can be installed in any partitions.

I put my Win7 in sda6, Win2k in sda7, Xp in sda8 and Vista in sda9. They have been there for years and I have migrated them between 1TB, 1.5TB and 2TB disks.

I put all the Windows boot loaders and Grub in sda1 which has no operating system of its own. They live happily with each other.

I have once put a Xp in 126 partitions and proved that each one could be booted up. Although I haven't tried it with Win7/Vista/Win2k I don't see any technical difficulty to install any of them in any where in a hard disk formatted with a partition table.