Partition Mess

Hello all,

So the other night I decided to do a clone of my laptop's hd as a back up using Macrium Reflect. However, it indicated that it couldn't do an MBR clone because it's limited to 3 partitions and my Source drive had 9!

Stunned I rebooted out of Kyhi's recovery usb and looked at Window's disk management tool. And sure enough I have this mess of partitions on my C: drive.



FYI, this laptop (Dell Inspiron 5558) was originally upgraded from Win 8.1 to Win 10 via the free update option.

So, ultimately I'd like to get this partition mess under control so I can easily do backups; what is the best way to get this cleaned up?

Thanks!

You can delete the last 4 they are all OEM ones thats assuming you never need to redo the pc to its original state. You can then grow c to fill the extra space. You dont need the 3rd one but its a bit of a pain to remove and then have to move c so I would leave that

Samuria said:

You can delete the last 4 they are all OEM ones thats assuming you never need to redo the pc to its original state. You can then grow c to fill the extra space. You dont need the 3rd one but its a bit of a pain to remove and then have to move c so I would leave that

The last 4 don't give me the option to delete, when they are clicked on (or right-clicked) the only option is "help"

Gobae said:

So the other night I decided to do a clone of my laptop's hd as a back up using Macrium Reflect. However, it indicated that it couldn't do an MBR clone because it's limited to 3 partitions and my Source drive had 9!

MBR is limited to 4 partitions, but the main reason you can't do an MBR clone of this drive is begcause it isn't an MBR drive, it is GPT.

Gobae said:

The last 4 don't give me the option to delete, when they are clicked on (or right-clicked) the only option is "help"

No, Disk management won't let you do anything (delete or assign a letter) if a partition is marked as an OEM partition. You'll need to use Diskpart if you want to delete them.

I addition to the good advice above, Minitool Partition Wizard is a useful tool to peruse and manage partitions.

Bree said:

No, Disk management won't let you do anything (delete or assign a letter) if a partition is marked as an OEM partition. You'll need to use Diskpart if you want to delete them.

Perfect! I used diskpart and the "override" parameter to successfully delete all those extra partitions. And the backup/imaging process worked without a problem!

TY!