How do I create a Recovery Partition and re-image my PC from there?

What you are proposing is not a preferred solution in terms of disaster recovery. A recovery partition is fine up to a point, but if the hard drive fails you are scuppered .

I suggest you consider the use of drive imaging software such as Acronis and save the image to an external drive - CD is possible, but you would need rather a lot. Acronis includes the ability to make a Recovery CD (If you purchase boxed software rather than download the installation CD is also a recovery CD). To restore an image of the drive you boot from the CD and point the software to the location of the image file.

As with all backups it is important to maintain a current image. To that end I run Acronis on a schedule to incrementally image my OS drive on a weekly basis.

BTW - to create a new partition on your drive you will need to use third party software - drives can be hidden by configuring the Registry or more conveniently by using Tweak UI.

 

I still use Norton Ghost 2003 and create partition images which get burned directly to DVD or a separate hard drive. And for client's systems I usually make a recovery DVD and store the images on a partition with permissions such that their user account cannot access the partition.

The separate partition is useful for recovery from virus infections, etc., but not any use if hard drive fails, thus DVDs.