That's interesting. Did it just fill itself, or as Milo suggests, put other stuff in it?
I simply will not buy a Laptop that has a visible recovery that eats up D drive in the list of logical drives. There's some nice units out there that are spoiled by that.
Is there a way to keep a recovery drive - by this I mean fairly current Windows updates - on a DVD and be able to do what you want with the HD?
I always have C D and E drives and dedicate C to the system and entwined programs. That seems to be most of them these days.