If you ever need support, they're going to ask you to go through tedious steps involving programs running out of the hidden partition. (That's what the big blue button above the keyboard is for. At least it's a blue button on my T42.)

In my experience, the IBM/Lenovo/Thinkpad software and drivers are actually pretty decent. The software update tool works pretty well. The Access Connection stuff works really well with multiple network connections and switching between wired and wireless connections.

Generally speaking, keeping the thinkpad drivers & programs up-to-date with the software update tool works out really well. I've never had an update cause problems, and in fact, many of the problems I've had were fixed by updating the relevant package.

Decent Thinkpad XP reinstall notes.

If you really want to trash that partition, just download a live linux distro like Knoppix and use that fdisk. trust me, it won't care.

Overall, I've just accepted the disk space loss from all the IBM stuff, more of it has proven useful than not, and is necessary when you have to call tech support, even if they end up being useless as you'd expect. And I've found that IBM did a much better job of o/s integration than Gateway/Dell/Micron where doing a flatout reformat was necessary.

--Nathan