Can someone please look at the below capture and tell me what the purpose of partitions 1, 2 ,4 & 5 are?
Should I keep them, and if so how can they potentially help me in the future?
Thanks for your help!
Last edited by provlima; 11 Oct 2017 at 11:45.
Not until you post it @provlima, I don't see any image or attachment in your post.
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Thanks for the heads up on forgetting to attach the image
here it is
I would keep them, the last three look like support partitions to restore your computer to a 'when you purchased it' state. they contain a boot partition for recovery, an image backup of your computer to restore it to when you first got it, I suspect the other one has tools that you can use. the other two are normal in windows 10.
Obviously it's a Dell and they go their own way, hence those extra partitions.
The Red 12 GB one is the Manufacturers recovery partition for Windows and the two each side look like Dell specific ones for recovery/support etc 4, 5, 6.
1,2, are standard though looks like Dell is a bit different, however they are for system use.
Don't meddle, you may want to use that recovery partition. You have plenty of drive space.
I would also make recovery media on a USB key drive, manufacturers usually direct you to do that, then you have an external copy should your HDD fail at some point.
Thanks for your input.
I made a macrium rescue disk in case I cant boot up. Would the recovery partition be reduntant? If not in what scenario would the recovery partition help?
Thanks for educating me on this important recovery issue
It looks to me like 3 (1 Windows itself) Windows GPT partitions, and 3 extra Dell recovery partitions because Dell LOVES to waste your space like that and installing Dell updaters and updaters for the updaters for things no one knows what the @#$% it is, etc.
I'd leave them alone...if I were you. If I were me, and I am, and I had a Dell, I would wipe that @#$% clean and reinstall Windows myself on a single, sensible sized partition, plus my own large storage partition where I would put my own backup image (Macrium, Acronis, etc) of the fresh, Dell-free, cleanly installed Windows/Linux without all the bloat...but that's just me.
Note: You made a rescue disk? Do you mean an image or just a bootable CD to run Macrium? Did you use that disk to make a back image of the entire Windows partition? If not, you need to. In theory, that is what Dell has done on those extra partitions, but I have never used those to restore a system, so...no idea how well it would work.
In theory (I do not trust anything I didn't create myself), they are in case you somehow borked your system or got a virus or something and wanted to just restore it to the state it was in the day you bought it, you would run a Dell boot CD or something (boot from one of those partitions?) and restore the image from that red 12 GB partition, overwriting the existing Windows partition. You lose everything that has changed since the day the backup image was made though, of course. That is why I always have a Storage Partition (and a backup of that on an external USB drive) on my builds where I keep anything I am not willing to lose at any moment. Almost nothing other than system files (parts of Windows/Linux itself) and installed programs are on my actual Windows partition for very long.
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