Removing recovery partition from a Vostro 3500

I have had some problems removing a Dell recovery partition on my Vostro 3500 laptop.

The partitions are arranged thusly:

Unnamed FAT32 Partition | RECOVERY | System drive

The recovery partition lies in between my system drive with all my data, the operating system (Windows 7 Home premium), etc, and an unnamed fat32 partition with a series of diagnostic scripts in it. RECOVERY was 15GB in size (only 5GB of that was in use), and the unnamed partition at the start was about 40MB. Only the system drive is mapped to a drive letter; the other two partitions have no drive letters attached to them.

In a live cd partition manager (Gparted), I formatted and de-allocated the recovery partition altogether, and then I moved the system drive to the left to slide into the free space, stretching the system drive by an additional 15GB. But I found that I could not boot the computer into my system drive, because the boot manager was in the recovery partition and I had deleted it. I thankfully had a backup of my computer with all its contents close at hand and recovered the entire thing all over again, but this raises my question:

How do I remove that recovery partition? It's taking up 15GB of space on my laptop and I've effectively been undersold on my hard drive space. I have no intention of using it, but I clearly cannot delete it straight away, because if I do the boot script is destroyed. The directory C:\dell has no utilities to remove this partition, as usually recommended in other forums. So what do I do?