We replaced the hard drive with a Patriot SSD in our iMac at work. I messed up while cloning the drive to the new SSD using a GPartEd CD. Everything works but there is about 40 GB unpartitioned that I want to recover. I cannot extend the main Macintosh HD partition using Disk Utility because the Recovery HD partition is "in the way", it is right after the Macintosh HD partition and all the free space is after the Recovery HD partition.
So, in short, is it safe to delete the Recovery HD partition? If not is there an easy way for me to remove it, resize my main partition, and then create a new Recovery HD partition?
Also, just out of curiosity, what does the Recovery HD partition do? Disk Utility seems to imply it has something to do with the bootloader but that doesn't make sense to me.
Edit: Partial duplicate of Can I repartition my primary hard drive without removing the Lion recovery partition?