I bought the same notebook from Best Buy on Thursday. Just read the emanual and you have three choices. The first two I list below seem to preserve or restore the recovery partition. The third option will clearly delete the recovery partition. The process does seem unnecessarily complicated but workable.
1. Recover Windows to first partition only.
This option will delete only the first partition, allowing you to keep other partitions, and create a new system partition as drive “C”.
2. Recover Windows to entire HD with 2 partition.
This option will delete all partitions from your hard drive and create two new partitions “C” (60%) and “D” (40%).
No. 1 seems to be the most straightforward. The third option is the one you want to avoid:
3. Recover Windows to entire HD.
This option will delete all partitions from your hard disk drive and create a new system partition as drive “C”.
You can elect to recovery from the recovery partition or the recovery DVD. Did you receive the recovery DVD with the notebook?