Would prefer to do away with that partition of course but just the same might not hurt to have it backed up on a flash drive just as a "what if" instead of zapping it into the ephemeral ether forever.  

I'm not super confident in my computer skills when it comes to these sorts of issues especially when tampering with setups. I know just enough to be dangerous so try and preserve things every step of the way in the hopes that some future disaster can be reversed.