Can i use HP Recovery partition for TI storage?

HP dv6500 notebook AMD Turion 64X2,Vista Premium, Hitachi ATA 141GB where C is 121GB and D (HP_Recovery ,5GB) is 7,26GB.

Owner is planning to buy now latest Acronis TI Home,but does not want to buy an external HD.

I was wondering if i could use the D partition now in use with HP Recovery by removing its content and placing there the very first image done with ATI: will there be any problems when trying to Restore that image?
I dont think there'll be any,even though that partition was inhabited by HP Recovery, but i am asking because i've become very unsure with Vista quirks...
Of course the partition needs to be extended to 50 GB to make room for ATI images and something else and i would have already done that if the 'extend' command was not greyed out in C.Management ...('shrink' instead- Vista knows i dont need it now- is operative...)
Someone suggested i use diskpart.exe via command prompt to do the resizing, while i thought of restoring the image and resize while restoring the first image taken.
What i wouldnt use,if ATI Home 11 still has that feature, is Secure Zone,which i have learnt to carefully avoid since ATI7.
What is the best option i can follow to achieve my aim of storing images on the HD?

 

Reading about troubles encountered by HP notebook users with the indigenous HP Recovery partition when trying to either shrink or extend, i reasoned the other way around and i successfully managed to shrink the C partition from 141 to about 80 GB,enabling this way a new Volume H sized at the maximum allowed by Vista manager at 60GB.
At long last i found a better feature in Vista than in XP...unbelievable!
Problem then happily solved.