I've got a pretty similar problem with my 5652 WLMi...like two times out of three it'll just turn on with a black screen and hang, no beeps or boot progress or anything. I also have to cut off the power before I can restart it, but...
So if I wanted to reformat my highly awesome 5652WLMi as NTFS and everything, would it be safe to kill the recovery partition after I've burned a recovery DVD?
Thanks!