Recovering from Xpress Recovery

Just a note for anyone wanting to remove Xpress Recovery from their
hard drive, so you won't have to repeat the same research as I did:

I experimented with Gigabyte's Xpress Recovery utility (included in
the BIOS of my 7N400Pro2 mb) shortly after I installed my new WinXP
system. It's supposed to make a hidden backup copy of your system
which can be restored if something corrupts your working system. The
explanation of it wasn't very clear, either in the manual or on
Gigabyte's web site, but what it actually did in practice was remove
about 8 Gbytes of my hard drive. From what I've pieced together, it
apparently takes advantage of an ability in most modern disk drives to
create a Host Protected Area (HPA), which is basically a hidden
partition accessed by a different set of BIOS commands than normal.
The Gigabyte utility removed part of the active NTFS partition to
create an HPA of the required size, then made a compressed backup copy
of my system and stored it in the HPA. Whether the backup included the
whole system, or just selected parts, I don't know - I did this before
I'd added a lot to the basic WinXP installation. Afterward my drive
size was reported as 8 Gbytes smaller.

Later I wanted to remove the Xpress Recovery partition and recover the
8 Gbytes of hard drive space. I used the "Remove" option in Xpress
Recovery, and it said "ok", but I didn't get back my 8 Gbytes. From
what I could see, this space was removed from the hidden HPA and
re-appeared as unallocated free space in the partition table. So I
figured I could probably recover it by extending my active NTFS
partition into the new free space. This proved to be the case. I guess
I could have used something like Partition Magic, but it turns out
that there's a way to do it in WinXP (see MS Knowledge Base acticle
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=325590). It says that it isn't
recommended for active boot partitions, but it works anyway.