Unused Hard Disk Partition

What brand is your laptop? Mine is an IBM and about 2GB had been set aside. This holds the OS, driver and other applications that has been setup as "factory defaults". So, if I need to reinstall my laptop, all I do is start the recovery process and it uses this "hidden" partition to get all it needsno extra installation CD/DVDs. I was provided with the option of creating a "rescue media(dvd)", which I did before I safely deleted the hidden partition.

So, find out if your laptop uses such partition for similar function(s). My advice is, until you find out what it is meant for, let the partition be!