Is it common not to have separate partition for system ?

I was looking into a friends Toshiba laptop because he wants to replace his HDD with SSD . I noticed that he does not have a separate partition for System . Is this common ?



Also he has a lot of unused partitions in front and after the C drive.

How best to clone copy the C drive to ssd? Tks

The first 1.48GB partition on that drive is also the system partition because it is marked as active. The second partition contains the Windows OS that is loaded when the computer boots from the system files in the first partition.

NavyLCDR said:

The first 1.48GB partition on that drive is also the system partition because it is marked as active. The second partition contains the Windows OS that is loaded when the computer boots from the system files in the first partition.

Why is the system partition showing as 100% free? Shouldn't there be something in it?

dalchina said:

Hi, It's not unusual to find more than one Recovery partition (the smaller ones, related to Windows). The last is presumably for a factory reset. You can consider whether you wish to retain that for any reason.

In using a SSD, you should aim to use AHCI protocol for better performance. There's a tutorial on how to change from IDE to AHCI.

Is the SSD larger or smaller? If larger, easy, If smaller, you could omit the largest recovery partition.

One of the smaller will be the current one- you could tell by the date (explore partitions using e.g. Minitool Partition Wizard, or by certain command prompt commands mentioned in this forum a good number of times, and as indicated in the previous post.

Trying to get him to uninstall unneeded programs and to move personal data to external storage so we can use a smaller 250Gb SSD. Obviously its a pain having an external appendage with a laptop . So I think we will end up using a 500Gb SSD

sportflyer said:

Why is the system partition showing as 100% free? Shouldn't there be something in it?

It's set as a hidden partition type. Use the explore feature in the Minitool Partition Wizard. That will show you the files in the partition.

NavyLCDR said:

It's set as a hidden partition type. Use the explore feature in the Minitool Partition Wizard. That will show you the files in the partition.

You are correct. Both Minitool Partition Wizard and Macrium Reflect shows they have data in them . Tks

sportflyer said:

You are correct. Both Minitool Partition Wizard and Macrium Reflect shows they have data in them . Tks

Now you asked what you should clone to a new SSD on that computer. That depends on what functionality you want to retain. Personally, if it were I, I would only clone the C: drive partition over, use a bootable USB flash drive such as Kyhi's recover tools or a Windows 10 installation USB flash drive to get into a command prompt. Mark the C: drive on the SSD as active using diskpart, then use the bcdboot and bootrec commands to make it bootable. You would lose all the factory recovery options that way, though.

Would prefer not to lose the Factory Recovery Partition .

1) Open administrative command prompt and type or copy and paste:

Code:

bcdedit /enum
bcdedit | find "osdevice"
reagentc /info
diskpart
list disk
list volume
select disk 0
detail disk
list partition
select partition 1
detail partition
select partition 2
detail partition
select partition 3
detail partition
select partition 4
detail partition
select partition 5
detail partition
select disk 1
detail disk
list partition
exit

2) When these have completed > right click on the top bar or title bar of the administrative command prompt box > left click on edit then select all > right click on the top bar again > left click on edit then copy > paste into the thread

3) Post images of the Minitool partition wizard into the thread.