how to delete a partition in Vista

I have a dell laptop with Vista home premium on it. I am upgrading shortly to windows7( very likely a clean install). However the laptop has a partition D on it ( recovery partition for Vista). Could somebody please tell me how to delete it presumably before win7 installation, unless I am adviced to keep it!!

When you install Windows 7 you will be able to delete it.

ok, but how?

I think when installing W7 it will give you the option to "use the entire disk" as I'm fairly sure Vista did too.

This being the case you don't need to do anything beforehand.

If you really want to get rid of partitions you can find a LiveCD for GParted or similar as an ISO and then "create disk from image file" or whatever in your favourite disk burner.

Remember to backup anything you want to keep before changing partitions - just in case.

If you change the size of the partition that Vista (or XP) is installed on, after you exit GParted and eject, reboot, allow Windows to complete any disk check that runs during its boot up.

Puppy and Ubuntu probably have GParted on the their LiveCD too - new version of Ubuntu out today.

To delete partition right click "My Computer" and select "Manage"
Double click "storage" then
double click "Disk Management (local)"
then right click disk D
select delete volume
after you have deleted d,
right click disk c and extend volume.

Then you will have just one larger partition.