I'm vehemently against recovery partitions. They waste perfectly good drive space and I'd sooner reinstall from scratch than use a bloated recovery partition.

To be honest I'd also rather reinstall Windows than troubleshoot bootloader problems, because the recovery console sucks. I'd just back up stuff onto another drive or partition, format the installation partition and reinstall.

My partitioning tool of choice is cfdisk, but Gparted/Qtparted is good if you want a GUI tool. They'll all be on any Linux live CD.