I had a question regarding TrueCrypt encryption.

How Secure is Encrypting Just the system partition Vs Whole Disk in the given scenario.

Hard Disk has 1partition for recovery (dell) 1 partition for Windows 7. if I were to only encrypt the System Partition how secure would that be?

My only thought is worse case scenario someone boots into recovery and wipes the whole drive, (which they could do anyway with a linux Distro and no bios pass). Is there anything i'm missing? Would true crypt store any file on the recovery partition that a forensics expert could use to hack the drive?

I would be concerned that if you encrypted the Dell recovery partition that it would no longer work... most of the recovery partitions are just press F12 at boot and select Recover or drop the CD in the drive and off it goes.

That was why I actually only encrypted the system partiton and not the recovery partition. The other concern was depending on if the bios supports it or not, if the recovery partition was encrypted, it would fail to boot.

Ah well in that case, you shouldn't encrypt the recovery partition, because as many others said, it would most likely not work, and if it doesn't contain any user data, no need to protect it further with encryption.

There is of course the scenario of an attacker using it, to recover the OS and thereby wiping the system partition.

TrueCrypt should however, not store any information on this partition at all, as I have been using partition-based encryption for years. The only thing that was proved insecure, at least for some time, were TrueCrypt containers (encrypted files that could be mapped as drives).

I usually delete the recovery partition though, and lock the bios too as much as possible, even though most bios passwords can be reset on the motherboard.

You should however note, that if you use partition based encryption, TrueCrypt will also overwrite the bootloader for e.g. Windows or Linux, depending on what you use. (And if you at a later point in time, overwrite TrueCrypt bootloader, which decrypts the Windows bootloader, it won't be fun   )