Cloning / Deleting HP Recovery Partition

Hi All
I am one of those people who HATE:fire: HP / Compaq "recovery" partitions. Whenever I come across a PC that has one, I usually try to find a way to get rid of it. However, I've come across a strange thing this time. A friend has an old Celeron 1.3 HP that has the recovery partition BEFORE the main Win XP NTFS partition - never seen that before! If I try to clone only the NTFS partition, I get jibberish. I seem to HAVE to copy BOTH partitions. Is there no way to get rid of this poxy recovery partition? Now before you ask, the reason I haven't just done a clean install is that the friend has a plethora of downloaded and "got from a friend" progs installed, and it would take far too much time to recover them all. So, I need to be able to keep things "intact".
Suggestions?
Regards
Peter

Is this clone being moved to another HD ?

IMO you shouldn't need the headache because its not your PC, make it easy on yourself and copy the whole HD :)

BTW what software do you use for cloning ?

In the end I found that Partition Magic 8.5 did the trick - it allowed me to just copy the XP partition and resize it at the same time. Then all I had to do was fixboot, fixmbr and bootcfg, and it was all good.