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#21
Just curious @sn00ker - this is covered in Brink's tutorial (https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/1...n-install.html) in the notes near end of Step 12 for installing Win10 without UEFI. I guess by definition, you can't do this for UEFI boot without having at least an EFI partition?
I have a similar issue. I have a 300MB EFI System partition and 3 recovery partitions; 450MB, 900MB, and 20GB. How can all 3 recovery partitions be relevant?
I would like to clean these up before putting this to rest. I know I could get rid of them with a clean install in 10, but I just got done doing the install. I would prefer not to have to go through with that all over again.
The 20GB on is an old oem partition from old OS, and can be deleted if you do not intend to go back to old OS.
The 900 MB partition is probably a hangover, and the 450 MB is the one you want to keep (but could be the other way round). If you assign drive letters temporarily to each partition, you can examine file created dates and work out which is newer.
You can backup the recovery partitions to an external drive using Macrium Refect Free.
The issue with me: I have a grub boot-loader, I want to tri boot my system with solaris. Because I use an MBR partitioning table, I can only have 4 primary partitions. Windows recovery partition is an extra partition on my drive that I would rather not have. I was wondering if I can delete my recovery partition ( the assigned boot drive ) and manually boot from the file system partition.
Answer to my question: I am not hundred percent... probably about 90% sure and 10% untested. In my case, I can probably delete the recovery partition and manually enter the primary windows files-system to be able to boot on the grub boot-loader. The primary file-system for windows has a boot assigned to it, it should work.
In your case scenario: You can back up your data, delete the recovery partition. I am 100% sure that afterwards, your windows will not boot automatically. In order to boot, you would probably have to press f9 or esc , go to boot manager and boot into your hard drive partition, manually. .. That may work, but I am not 100% sure. The problem nowadays may arise, when you have a GPT partition table for the new bios system. .. Windows * + work with UEFI BIOS that can give you complication. .. So I recommend backing up your data, and make sure the format of your HDD is in MBR partition, before trying. You can also test the theory with Virtualization.. VMWARE.. such. you can delete the recovery partition and try to boot into the virtualized system for testing.... .
GOOD LUCK