Dell Backup & Recovery Failure

I am about to replace my Seagate Muskie 2TB hard drive on my XPS27 which is failing the SMART Test. I will be contacting my warranty provider to get Dell to replace the hard drive. In preparation for that I have moved my music and pictures to the cloud. I thought I would use Dell B&R to create a recovery disk as well while I can.  The system was originally delivered with Win 8 but due to an OS crash and updates it is now running win 8.1. When I started the Dell Backup program it told me that I had upgraded to Win 8.1 and that my hidden recovery partition was corrupted. The program offered to solve all my problems for $30.00 with an upgrade to premium support. That would allow me to make a recovery image on a Thumb Drive.  I declined that generous offer.  I installed Seagate Disc Wizard (Acronis Lite) which is free to anyone using a Seagate hard drive. The Disc Wizard program shows the hidden rescue partition with the option to delete it or install a new one. It also can create a Thumb Drive recovery image. Admittedly Acronis is a bit daunting and dangerous.

My questions:

1. Since Dell B&R does not show up in Control Panel is it hidden in that recovery partition. Since it is not functional how can it be deleted?  I cannot install over it by downloading a later version.  I get the message that the old program must be deleted first. It seems that the program must be updated from within itself but then it tries to up sell me.

2. I know that I will be given a bare drive and if possible I will try to clone that drive using Disc Wizard.  I do not want to clone a bad recovery partition so I want to delete it ahead of time. Any suggestions? I suppose I could use Disc Wizard for that. Rebuilding the OS from scratch is painful as I have to start with win 8 and go from there.

I did make a Windows Recovery Thumb Drive which is bootable. That may be the best option but, I like to have more than one option available on D day.

Thanks In Advance I Hope!

William