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Clean Installation - Recovery Partition Position
Hi everyone,
this is my first post and I wish to deeply thank you for giving newbies like me the chance of being here.
What I did
I performed a clean (fresh) installation of Windows 10 on different PC's, specifically two Lenovo laptops, Z50-70 and Yoga 2 13 (Home 64 bit), and a HP ProDesk 400 (Pro 64 bit).
As all machines came with Windows 8.1 pre-installed, the first thing was to Upgrade all systems to Windows 10 to avoid any later activation problems.
Then I used a bootable USB key prepared with the Media Creation Tool made available by Microsoft here:
Get Windows 10
What happened :)
During the clean installation, having chosen "Custom: Install Windows only", I was asked "Where do you want to install Windows" (images refer to the installation performed on the Lenovo Z50).
Hence, I took the chance of getting rid of the mess of partitions, mostly useless, which affects, to a different extent, all pre-loaded PC's, and that includes recovery partition(s) added after upgrades to more recent OS's. Kindly note that to revert to factory settings one must first create an external recovery drive because after having deleted the recovery partition(s) this will no longer be possible. I confirmed deleting
and I obtained a very nice single Unallocated Space
where I created a New partition. As a matter of fact, Windows Setup, diligently and without any further prompts, created the "default partition layout for UEFI-based PCs [...]: a system partition, an MSR, a Windows partition, and a recovery tools partition". (Source: UEFI/GPT-based hard drive partitions, Microsoft).
The only difference being that the Recovery partition is the first one and not the last one...
The rest of the installations went on regularly and everything works just fine now.
Why am I puzzled
In the above mentioned article about UEFI/GPT-based hard drive partitions the Author, where it gets to the Recovery tools partition, states that "We recommend that you place this partition immediately after the Windows partition. This allows Windows to modify and recreate the partition later if future updates require a larger recovery image."
Which makes perfectly sense to me!
And, in fact, he shows the following as the already mentioned "default partition layout for UEFI-based PCs":
Questions
- Is the position of the Recovery Partition really important or the array set by the Windows Setup media should be considered as fine?
- Is there any possible ways of setting a different position for the Recovery partition through the Windows Setup process, considering that the instructions about where positioning the Recovery Partition are embedded in the Microsoft official media against what the very same Microsoft states?
- In the Clean install of Windows 10 on the Microsoft Community forum, a Contributor clearly put up a
"WARNING: When clean installing Windows 10, do not create a recovery partition on the Hard Drive. Doing so will cause Windows 10 Operating System to display "Windows is not Activated" in Computer Properties, forcing you to go into Disk Management, and delete the Recovery Partition, and Extend it to your C:." In your experience, is this true? For sure not in mine.
Thank you all in advance for your co-operation.
Last edited by Lmbrt; 16 May 2016 at 13:07.