Post installation of 16179.00 and cleanup, I noticed a lot of partitions(6). I marked two, not sure why they are there?? appreciate thoughts. Tx
My AU edition has four partitions. Recovery, Fat32, Other and C:
Last edited by meebers; 19 Apr 2017 at 19:36.
The 16 MB partition is the Microsoft System Reserved (MSR) partition that is allegedly required to be on all GPT partition type drives.
Understanding Disk Partitions
The 7.45 GB is not a partition. It is unallocated space which is just empty. You would have to move the 1.95 GB recovery partition to the end of the drive in order to add the 7.5 GB unallocated space to the C: drive partition.
Ok I did what you recommended, tx for that. I looked at a webpage titled "MS UEFI/GPT-based hard drive partitions" and for the recovery partition it recommends that this partition should be placed immediately after the windows partition.
I now have a 2 partitions marked recovery, one at the beginning and one at the end. I don't believe a need both??
The 2nd 1.99 GB recovery partition is likely the recovery partition that came with the computer from the factory. It is highly unlikely that without some advanced commands or original factory software it could even be used. It's up to you whether to delete it or not. Delete it and you lose what little possibility there was of restoring the factory software back onto the computer.
It won't affect Windows 10 on the computer, you can still reload that in the future. And you should be able to purchase the factory recovery disc for the computer if you really wanted to for some reason. None of my computers have the factory recovery partition left on them, but most of my retail computers do have images saved on external storage (NAS) of their hard drives before I even logged onto them the first time, though I have never needed to go back to any of those images.
Good point. You can always assign a drive letter to it and see what's there. Or use the explore function of MiniTool Partition Wizard which also shows all the hidden folders and files easily without assigning a driver letter. Also, some manufacturers put their recovery programs in a separate partition from the actual recovery images, so that might be what is there, which would be useless without the recovery images.
Dell puts a 1.6 GB Recovery partition on some of its systems, after the larger, image partition. What it is used for I do not know for sure, but the systems do have a diagnostic which can be used from a boot selection.
Well, that is completely backwards from what I expected. From the looks of it, partition 1 is the useless partition. In order to reclaim that space, though, you would have to move the EFI System partitions and the MSR partitions to the front of the drive after you deleted partition 1. That can sometimes be very problematic. So, I would either just leave that partition or delete it and leave it unallocated space. It's only 500MB. If you get down to where you are missing that 500MB space then you should be thinking about moving some data or getting a larger drive anyway.
The last partition, 1.99GB recovery partition appears to be the real recovery partition in use. It's a mystery how it got to be 1.99GB in size. You can use the Partition Wizard program to shrink it to 450 MB (moving the left edge or the front of the partition back, to the right). Then add the 1.5GB of extra space created to the end of C: drive.
If you ever decide to do a clean install of Windows, just erase that whole drive, deleting all partitions on it, then select the unallocated space to install to and Windows will set it up correctly.
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