Can a virus infect the HP recovery partition?

Question

I have an HP dv6400 laptop with Vista, which I bought ~1 year ago. It came with a "diskless recovery system" - a separate partition (D:) on the original hard drive with which you can do a factory restore. It says you can create backup CDs from this partition (probably a good idea), but I never bothered to do so. Got a virus a coupla days ago, which used my internet connection to quickly start installing all kinds of crazy programs on my computer. Realized it in about 10 minutes, turned off my computer, hit f11 when it was restarting and did a full system recovery which reformatted the Windows (C:) partition and reinstalled all the programs that my computer came with. Everything seems to be working fine now, but I'm still worried - I'm wondering is it possible for the virus to have infected the D: partition, and to have found its way back on to my computer during the system restore process? Has anyone heard of this happening? Or is the system restore partition made to be inaccessible/read-only?

Answer 1

I have 2 HP's and have never had a problem with using the D partition recovery, but I also have copies on CD just in case as I import malware on one to test software protection.  I have never had any infection get into the D partition, and have carried out several recoveries from it using Destructive Recovery.  

The D partition is never written to, it's a safe storage area for the recovery of your system to it's original factory presets.