Thanks again tomcat. What I thought was weird was the recovery partition was visible in explorer and assigned the "D:" letter. That annoyed me. I've never seen a PC that showed the recovery partition and assigned it such a low drive letter. I'm used to partitioning and grabbing "D" for my personal stuff.
There was no recovery media with the laptop. The Recovery partition D:\ says it's 13.1 GB, of which there is 1.59 GB free. Which I think is a little large.
In addition to this. Macrium creates a single image file and easy to perform selective restore of files/folders by mounting the image as a virtual drive. Image verification is also included with Macrium.
With Windows built in backup/restore. There's no option to verify whether the backup is any good. It creates multiple files/folders so if any of those are missing/corrupted then you are out of luck. In addition, once the backup is created on a HD, you cannot move them anywhere else due to security built in with Windows Backup/Restore and that's why some people are having problem to perform restore because Windows Backup/Restore cannot find it.
It's got the HP OS and all the bundled bloatware in it.........Win 10 is normally about 450MB, like I said earlier. Blow away all the partitions. Just let the clean install do it's thing.Thanks again tomcat. What I thought was weird was the recovery partition was visible in explorer and assigned the "D:" letter. That annoyed me. I've never seen a PC that showed the recovery partition and assigned it such a low drive letter. I'm used to partitioning and grabbing "D" for my personal stuff.
There was no recovery media with the laptop. The Recovery partition D:\ says it's 13.1 GB, of which there is 1.59 GB free. Which I think is a little large.
FYI, This Recovery partition contains the factory image to allow you to restore the system back to the day you bought the Laptop. Normally, the Recovery partition should be hidden and you don't see a letter D: assigned from Disk Management. However, they can use "diskpart" command to assign a letter D: to this partition. You can use "diskpart" to remove the D: letter then it won't show up in file explorer. Since you are going to fresh install Windows 10 then you don't have to worry about this.There was no recovery media with the laptop. The Recovery partition D:\ says it's 13.1 GB, of which there is 1.59 GB free. Which I think is a little large.
On a fresh install of Windows, you will have the disk partition scheme in the order as shown below:
1 - 450MB Recovery partition
2 - 100MB EFI System partition containing boot code. Without it, you won't be able to boot Windows
3 - 16MB MSR Reserved partition (hidden from disk management, to see it, use "diskpart", needed for GPT disk to function properly.
4 - The rest is your C: Drive
So, for clarity, the .iso I burned to DVD via the Microsoft Media Creation Tool will install a clean copy of Win 10 after all existing partitions are wiped? And the Win10 product key that came with my laptop (visible in System Properties) will activate it?
Also, for what it's worth, I'm only asking all of this for future reference. The laptop is only a few days old and is working great. I'd like to just wipe the recovery partition right now and use it for my docs. I just wanted to be certain that wasn't a no-no in case I ever do have to reinstall.
Any recommendations on (free) partitioning apps? I used Easeus last time in 2011 to partition my Win7 machine, but it looks now like they removed the resizing option from the free version and I wanted to make the D partion bigger. (The resizing feature was included in the free version back in 2011.)
Correct, but you might have to download and install drivers for some hardware if Windows does not have them included.
MiniTool Partition Wizard Free:
Best Free Partition Manager for Windows | MiniTool Partition Free
Guys, thank you so much for advising me on this. I really really appreciate you all taking the time to help me out!
Hey tomcat, sorry I have to resurrect this thread briefly. I was speaking with an HP service rep and he told me one of the improvements Microsoft is making to Activation 3.0 (for newly built machines that come preloaded with Windows 10) is you won’t have a COA (Certificate of Authenticity) sticker attached to the machine anymore. Instead, this will be embedded in the BIOS. This will avoid product keys from "being compromised"; the OEM pre-installed license is tied to the machine, if you re-installed using the recovery partition or OEM recovery media it will not ask for a product key as it will automatically be pulled from the BIOS.
I clarified that if I attempt to reinstall from a DVD it will ask for a product key and if I give it the one I have from the System Properties panel it won't accept it. He said no, it won't be accepted. He also said the product key is not accessible from the BIOS screens when I asked.
He said my only recovery option if I want to wipe that partition is to use the supplied HP Sytstem Recovery Tool to burn the whole thing to either 5(!!!) DVDs or a USB drive.
Is he yanking my chain? I don't see why a legal installation DVD wouldn't work if I have the product key and product ID number for this machine. Maybe they just don't want users reinstalling without all their extra crap...?
Yes, he was yanking your chain. Run showkeyplus from this forum if you want to see your product key from bios:
Solved Showkey - Windows 10 Forums
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