Numerous recovery partitions after a few formats and installations

The standard recovery partition that Windows 10 creates is 450 MB in size which I don't even see on your drive so it looks like all of those must be manufacturer specific. You can more than likely delete all of them and the only thing that will be affected is your ability to do a factory reset back to the original full factory load of software. You can see which partition Windows will use for the troubleshooting menu by opening a command prompt (admin) and running:

reagentc /info

Be careful, though because there is a hidden MSR partition in there that does not show up in disk management, so you actually have to use either MiniTool Partition Wizard to see actual partition numbers or the diskpart command in a command prompt (admin) window. See my example below.

The WindowsRE location is the partition that Windows uses for the troubleshooting menu. The image location is the partition will load a custom image from during a reset and may not be present. My image location is set to a Windows 10 image contained on the second hard drive on my computer - notice it is on harddisk1 and not harddisk0.

Code:

C:\WINDOWS\system32>diskpart

Microsoft DiskPart version 10.0.14393.0

Copyright (C) 1999-2013 Microsoft Corporation.
On computer: JOHN-LAPTOP

DISKPART> select disk 0

Disk 0 is now the selected disk.

DISKPART> list part

  Partition ###  Type              Size     Offset
  -------------  ----------------  -------  -------
  Partition 1    Recovery           450 MB  1024 KB
  Partition 2    System             100 MB   451 MB
  Partition 3    Reserved            16 MB   551 MB
  Partition 4    Primary            446 GB   567 MB

DISKPART> exit

Leaving DiskPart...

C:\WINDOWS\system32>reagentc /info
Windows Recovery Environment (Windows RE) and system reset configuration
Information:

    Windows RE status:         Enabled
    Windows RE location:       \\?\GLOBALROOT\device\harddisk0\partition1\Recovery\WindowsRE
    Boot Configuration Data (BCD) identifier: fcaab811-8717-11e6-843d-aa73efa5da58
    Recovery image location:   \\?\GLOBALROOT\device\harddisk1\partition3\Sources
    Recovery image index:      1
    Custom image location:
    Custom image index:        0

REAGENTC.EXE: Operation Successful.

Hey, thanks a lot.



I tried to color code to make it clearer.
What confuses me the most, is:

- What's the use of the green "System" partition given the big C one is also system? "EFI"?
- Is it possible to re-create the red Lenovo partition when resetting the PC?
- The light blue "OEM Partition"?

Thanks for clarifying.

SOURCE: Lenovo Yoga Pro 2 Partition Cleanup





Partition 1 - Recovery (WINRE_DRV) - 1000MB

• Windows RE bootable (for Recovery Mode)
• Used when booting into Windows Recovery (Win RE) environment

Partition 2 - System (SYSTEM_DRV) - 260MB

• System UEFI bootable (EFI/Windows boot menu)
• UEFI boots this partition, it contains Windows NTLDR, HAL, Boot.txt, and some drivers (Windows will not boot without this)

Partition 3 - OEM (LRS_ESP) - 1000MB

• Lenovo Recovery System (EFI bootable)
• Lenovo One Key Recovery (OKR) button boots into this partition, which allows to do factory restore

Partition 4 - Reserved (MSR) - 128MB

• Reserved Microsoft partition for GPT-based disks
• Must exist and must be 128MB, used by Windows when moving/changing partitions through Disk Manager

Partition 5 - Primary (Windows8_OS) - 218GB

• Main C: drive - contains Windows, installed programs, etc

Partition 6 - Primary (LENOVO) - 4GB

• Lenovo D: drive - contains mainly drivers and installers for some bundled apps

Partition 7 - Recovery (PBR_DRV) - 13GB

• Lenovo factory reset image
• Used by One Key Recovery system to reset laptop to factory condition

There you go...looks like the explanation @Avocado provided and the article linked to is about the best info there is!

Thank you, NavyLCDR and Avocado. Extremely helpful. In recovery through a USB stick, I ended up using "clear" while in select disk 0 -> list partition, then renewing the uniform unallocated space. Windows automatically created the necessary partitions.

That's the best way to do a clean install!