Mirroring HD

I plan on mirroring, cloning, whatever you want to call it, my internal HD to an external HD
(well it's not really an external HD, it's an internal HD housed in a case, so if something happens to the HD now in my PC I can replace it).

The question I have is my PC is an HP with factory installed Windows XP Home. Needless to say HP did not include the original OS cd in the package. Instead HP has a lousey recovery partition on the current HD, which I have read in many forums doesn't work half the time.

If I mirror the current HD to the external HD, including of course the OS, do I still need to keep the lousey recovery partition which takes over 5GB of space and is formatted FAT32 while the rest of the HD is NTFS or can I eliminate the recovery partition?