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Can I delete the OEM and Recovery Hard Drive Partitions?
Hi,
I have an AlienWare 17 R2 laptop that I bought from Dell about 1-1/2 years ago. It came with Windows 7 Professional pre-installed. The hard drive has the following three primary partitions:
- OEM Partition 39 MB
- Recovery 10.20 GB
- OS (C:) - 921.28 GB <= Windows 7 is installed on this partition
I would like to setup this computer for a multi-boot configuration that would give me the following OS choices:
- Windows 7 (my existing installation)
- Windows 10
- Windows XP
I plan on using BootIT Bare Metal by Terabyte unlimited to help me create my multi-boot configuration. I would like for my each of my three Windows versions to be on a dedicated primary partition, and I would like to keep my number of primary partitions to the typical PC/Windows limit of four. To make this possible, I would like to delete the OEM partition and the Recovery Partition.
Can anyone tell me, considering I have a standard "Dell" or "Alienware" configuration, can I simply delete these partitions with no adverse side effects? Or will deleting either of these break my Windows 7 installation?
Thanks in advance,
Paul
ejn63
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December 23rd, 2016 12:00
Once you've made your recovery media and have no further use for the Dell diagnostics, you can safely delete those partitions. That said, running XP on hardware this new is neither likely to work, nor worth the time and effort to try - it's unlikely you'll even get it to run.
Philip_Yip
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December 23rd, 2016 15:00
Windows 7 and Windows 10 64 Bit can be installed using the GPT partition scheme for UEFI BIOS allowing for up to 128 partitions. The Recovery partition will be of no use for a Clean Windows installation. You will need to compromise the security of the Windows 10 install by disabling Secure Boot as Windows 7 doesn't support it.
http://dellwindowsreinstallationguide.com/download-windows-10-oem-and-retail-iso/
http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/software-os/f/3524/t/19999620
http://dellwindowsreinstallationguide.com/uefi
You won't be able to install Windows XP natively as its reached end of life and has no drivers for modern hardware... Windows XP can however very easily be virtualised:
http://dellwindowsreinstallationguide.com/installation-of-windows-and-linux-on-a-virtual-machine-using-vmware-player/
Simon233
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December 27th, 2016 22:00
If you have made the recovery disk, you can delete the oem partitions directly. How to Delete Recovery Partition in Windows Safely?