So, I decided to upgrade my HDD to a small SSD because I have all my music videos and documents on my NAS. So I installed Windows 10 onto the SSD and looked at my SSD to see that I only have 17.5GB of 36.5GB of space left. Its a 120GB SSD and nothing but the OS and google chrome on it. So, I pulled up my disk manager and see that Win 10 has made 4 separate partitions of which I cannot delete nor access for storage. Anyone have the same problem?
Hi,
Seen this before on laptops with OEM recovery partition(s).
From looking at the Diskmanager graph the story is easy enough to read: Huge system partition, OS partition and two OEM Recovery partitions.
The SSD is old style MBR so I guess it's running in either Bios mode or CSM but not UEFI. I guess it has 8 Gb of RAM installed too.
So, if you're machine is fully UEFI compliant I'd suggest backing up the entire drive with something like Macrium Reflect Free and start afresh converting the SSD to GPT and creating just a single partition of say 40 Gb (depending on the amount of software you intend to load onto it. The run Windows setup and tell it to install itself in the freshly created partition.
It will automagically create the other GPT partitions for you. After setup has finished you can then create whatever partitions you fancy to store data, backups and what have you.
Should the machine be BIOS only you can run a similar scenario, just do not convert the SSD to GPT, just CLEAN it using diskpart or any GUI based partitioning program after you made the necessary safety backups.
Be ware if you run hardware for which MS doesn't provide drivers. Best to cull them from the web or whatever before you start afresh.
If the OEM recovery partitions contain system images of an older OS and you decide to go Win 10 then they'll be pretty useless by then anyhow so no need to keep them but having a backup on separate media handy may well be sound advice.
Cheers,
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