I don't need the RECOVERY partition. How can I remove it?

Hello!

I've just purchased a Latitude 6540 with a 500GB HDD.  Furthermore I've a 250GB SSD that I'd like to use in place of the original HDD, which I planned to use as external disk for additional recovery images and backups.

The original HDD had three partitions:

OEM Partiion:  NTFS   Healthy                                                                                             39 MB
RECOVERY:   NTFS   Healthy (System, Active, Primary Partition):                                    15,67 GB NTFS
OS (C:)            NTFS   Healthy (Boot, Page File, Crash Dump, Primary Partition)              450,06 GB 

I cloned the whole HDD to the SSD using Macrium Reflect, so the two disks are now exactly the same.
I will keep the RECOVERY partition of the HDD (which contains the factory image) and, as I said above, I will use this disk to store an additional image and maybe backups (I think this is even safer than storing the image on the internal disk).

For this reason I don't need the RECOVERY partition on the SSD (it occupies almost 16 GB !!!) and I want to remove it.

This partition was marked as Active (Strange thing for me: I would expect the OS partition to be the active one).  I replaced the HDD with the SSD and rebooted the system: it was working OK. 

Then I tried removing this useless (for me) RECOVERY partition, after having configured the OS one as Active.  BUT.... it doesn't work ! 

I looked at some previous threads on the same subject, but I couldn't find a solution. I only understood that the RECOVERY partition contains some files that are needed when Windows is booting from the OS partition.

The point is I really would like to remove the RECOVERY partition and get back those 16 GB of the SSD.

Does anyone know if it there is a proved way to solve the problem ?  Maybe moving the needed files, or executing a different procedure...I don't know...

The alternative would be to reformat the drive and reinstall Windows 7 from scratch but I'm a bit reluctant abut this for the following reasons:

1) I don't have the Windows 7 installation disks.
2) I assume that the original installation was optimized by Dell for my 6540. Furthermore, the installation includes specific Dell tools form maintenance and diagnostic

If I had to proceed this way (I hope not!)
- where can I get the Windows installation disks ?
- do I need all the disks, or just the first one and then all the others can be installed from network?
- will I be able to reach the same final configuration as the original system ?

Anyway, I hope someone can help me finding a solution to remove the partition.

Sorry for the long post, but I wanted to be clear as much as possible.
Thank you.

Ettore