Is it safe to delete the "recovery" partition from my hard drive

There is a partition in my hard disk that is meant to be reserved for recovery. And it is named recovery. The partition is 7Gb in size. Is it safe to format this partition so that I could also save files in there. I think its meant to recover the first operating system that is installed. Which is Windows vista. Because after I formatted drive C where vista is installed. I could still see the choice to boot vista in the boot loader after installing Windows 7

The recovery partition is generally put there by OEMs so you can restore to factory state without needing to find a restore DVD.

It's usually safe to delete, but whenever messing around with partitions it's a good idea to have a functioning backup... just in case.