Do I need the Recovery patition?

When I bought my Dell 530S in March '09 it came with Vista installed. I had a local computer repair shop replace Vista with XP Home.

I plan to use Paragon Drive Backup to do Disk Image on an external HDD..

I have a D: partition labeled Recovery.

 From Computer Management:

Volume            Layout      File System     Status                              Capacity      Free

                         Partition       Fat               Healthy (EISA Config.)     39MB         31MB

(C:)                  Partition       NTFS           Healthy (Boot)                  283.39GB  264.43GB                 

Recovery (D:)  Partition      NTFS           Healthy (System)            14.65GB    13.74GB           

How can I get rid of the D: partition?