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A few questions about hard drive partitioning...
Hi everyone, I'm new to the forums. Yesterday, I bought an Inspiron 15 3567 laptop. Some detailed specs are that it runs on Windows 10 Home x64 (Creators Update I believe). It also has 8 GB RAM with an Intel Core I3 processor and a 1 TB Hard Drive. This... being where I'm mostly interested in.
I have a few questions regarding the hard drive and about creating new partitions... Thanks to anybody willing to help me solve them. But before I continue, my interest in partitioning the disk is mainly because in my old laptop, I had two main ones; Drive C was for Windows and programs, while Drive D was for all of my personal stuff. This because in case Windows decided to fail or something similar, I'd only need to format the drive it was installed in while keeping my data safe. Anyway...
1.- Will partitioning my hard drive void my warranty? (Like I mentioned, I bought it yesterday).
2.- I checked in the Disk Manager, and I have 5 partitions:
- 500Mb (System EFI)
- 917.22GB Drive C: (Where the OS is installed)
- 496MB (Recovery Partition)
- 12.07GB (Recovery Partition)
- 1.12GB (Recovery Partition)
So, let's say that I do decide to partition my disk and create a new one taking space from Drive C; I would name this new partition Drive D. Will this affect the way the recovery partitions work? Or will they not work anymore?
3.- Do any of these partitions have any crucial data? In my old laptop, what I'd do is wipe the drive completely and do a clean install from scratch. Can this still be done the same way, or is there any important stuff other than backups in them?
Hopefully I could explain myself. Thanks in advance to any help given.
jphughan
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June 6th, 2018 05:00
1. You can rearrange partitions and even wipe your entire disk without voiding your warranty.
2. The 12GB Recovery partition is a Dell Recovery partition that contains a factory image of your system. That can be deleted if you'd feel confident performing a clean install of Windows from regular media and then reinstalling applications, drivers, etc. Some people prefer doing that anyway rather than restoring all of the stuff that Dell included.
3. As for the others, is the partition list the way you provided it the sequence in which they appear on disk from left to right as shown in Disk Management? If so, I don't understand why you would have 2 non-Dell Recovery partitions both after your OS partition. It's fairly common to have an original Windows Recovery partition first on the disk, then a new larger Windows Recovery partition immediately after your C drive if you upgraded to a newer release of Windows, since the new version might have needed to create a larger Recovery partition than the original's size. But if the 496MB Recovery partition is already immediately after your OS partition, then Windows should just continue shrinking your C drive to make that partition larger as needed, so I don't know why you'd have a 1.12 GB partition. If you wanted to browse their contents, you could use the "diskpart" tool to temporarily assign those a drive letter. You might also need to enable "Show hidden files" and disable "Hide protected operating system files".
4. Creating a new D drive by shrinking your C drive is fine, and you will not disrupt the Recovery partition's functionality by doing so. However, the preferred design is to have the OS partition, then the Windows Recovery partition, and THEN any other partitions that you or Dell wants, because again that layout allows Windows to shrink your C drive to extend that Recovery partition as needed during future Windows 10 upgrades. If you have other partitions between your OS partition and Windows Recovery partition, then that may not happen, so you could potentially end up with yet another partition.
One option you may want to consider for a variety of reasons is capturing at least occasional image backups of your system. That would mean you'd probably never need to worry about the Recovery partitions anyway, it would allow you to restore your system without bringing back the partitions you don't want, and obviously it will allow you to reliably recover from large issues that might render your system unbootable -- and of course it backs up your data. Macrium Reflect Free is a popular tool for this purpose.
Michael_ACL
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June 6th, 2018 08:00
Thanks so much! I just installed EaseUs Partition Master to shrink and create a personal partition from Drive C. Funny thing is, in EaseUs there are 9 partitions shown... weird.
Even stranger is that it shows partitions as small as 1 mb and another of 711 kb... If what you said is correct, what I could do is again, like I did in my other laptop. Wipe the entire drive and only leave two partitions; one for Windows and another for my data.
I'm used to give my devices heavy maintenance at least twice a year, including a clean install of Windows in each run. What I was worried about was the warranty and in case something important was in the recovery partitions.
So, to reconfirm. I can wipe everything without having to worry about any troubleshooting or similar? Like I mentioned, I'm so-so familiar with partitioning and clean installing from scratch.
jphughan
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June 6th, 2018 09:00
You can wipe your disk without any warranty impact. Whether you have any troubleshooting impact depends entirely on whether you do things properly. :)
A standard Windows 10 disk layout for a UEFI system includes the following partitions in the following order:
Recovery (typically 450-800MB)
EFI/System (typically 100MB)
MSR (typically 16MB, not shown in Disk Management but shown in diskpart)
OS
If you wipe your disk and run Windows Setup from scratch, it will create all of those partitions in that order. The better solution to avoid having that Recovery partition end up "deprecated" and taking up space after a new larger one is created later would be to manually partition your disk to create the Recovery partition after the OS partition and then perform a command-line installation of Windows instead of using the Windows Setup wizard, but not everyone is comfortable doing that. And realistically, losing 450-800 MB of capacity isn't the end of the world.
If the OS partition is the last one on disk, then any additional partitions you want to create should exist after it. If you place the Recovery partition after the OS partition, then any additional partitions should be created after the Recovery partition. Basically, you want the Recovery partition to be either at the beginning of the disk or immediately after your C partition.
jphughan
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June 6th, 2018 10:00
Partition order typically doesn't matter in the absolute sense, but some layouts make more sense than others based on how Windows does things. In terms of your proposed layout, I don't see the 16-128MB MSR partition represented. That needs to exist immediately after the EFI partition. But before you make changes it would be good to know which of those is your active Windows Recovery partition. To do that, run Command Prompt as administrator and enter this:
reagentc /info
Note the partition number that's shown in the path, then enter the following:
diskpart
select disk 0
list partition
See whether the Recovery partition identified by ReagentC corresponds to the 496MB or 1.12GB partition. Note that partitions are numbered based on creation sequence, not by sequence on disk, which isn't always the same thing and which is why you have to check diskpart.
If you find that the 496MB partition is your Recovery partition, then it would good to find out what the 1.12GB partition is, which you can do by following the instructions in my earlier post in terms of temporarily assigning a drive letter and showing all hidden files. If on the other hand you find that the 1.12GB partition is your Recovery partition, then that partition should be placed immediately after your C drive, and you can probably just delete the 496MB partition. You could also delete the 12.07GB Dell Recovery partition if you don't expect to need to perform a factory restore because you're comfortable performing a clean install.
And perhaps stating the obvious here, but capture an image backup before you proceed with a live partition rearrangement. I personally use Macrium Reflect for this purpose.
Michael_ACL
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June 6th, 2018 10:00
Hmmmm. I'm still kinda fresh on the subject, but if partition order does matter, I guess I could save all the trouble by leaving my personal partition at last position? What I'm doing now is shrinking Drive C to create Drive D.
Once that's done, I'll move Drive D to last position and it would stay this way:
That should work without any problems?
All of this done with EaseUs of course.
Saltgrass
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June 6th, 2018 11:00
@jphughan, we need to be careful with this since on two of my Dell systems, the recovery tools were placed in the ~11 GB partition.. The 1803 Windows build upgrade did some strange things.
jphughan
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June 6th, 2018 11:00
Ugh, good to know though. If that happened on the OP's system, the ReagentC command should make that clear. But in that case it would be even more strange that the OP has two other Recovery partitions and that both of them are placed after the C drive....
jphughan
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June 6th, 2018 12:00
So what's on your "mid-size" Recovery partition that's 1.12 GB on the OP's system?
Saltgrass
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June 6th, 2018 12:00
The OP's partition configuration are the same as I show on my Inspiron 15 7567, except for the D partition and the small recovery partition is a little larger than my 450 MB.
Michael_ACL
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June 6th, 2018 13:00
I ran reagent.exe and it throws an error 3 code, probably due to me messing with the partitions I guess. I'm not much worried about it given I'll probably due a clean install much later like I stated before. However, after a bit of investigation, part of the reason I couldn't understand the "why" behind the recovery partitions was because I was used to working with a Legacy Bios laptop, and this Dell Inspiron has UEFI.
So, from my understanding, UEFI crucially needs the four partitions @jphughan stated in an earlier post. From my partition table, that should be the four first partitions? Because from more investigation, all partitions below Drive D belong to Dell and can be deleted without any problem.
This brings up a few more questions:
1.- What is the purpose behind reagent.exe? If it has to do with the recovery drive, this can be recreated when doing a clean install?
2.- The Recovery, EFI, MSR partitions are created during a clean install, correct?
If that's the case, I think I don't have anything to worry about. But still, what's up with the error 3 code when running reagent?
By the way, thanks so much so far for all your help @jphughan. Kudos to you. :)
Michael_ACL
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June 6th, 2018 16:00
Thanks so much! One final question, you mention that in case of an OS Update, it would create a deprecated Recovery Partition.
Could I just format it so it would be unallocated space and extend it to Drive C?
(Sorry for asking too much. xD)
jphughan
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June 6th, 2018 16:00
Happy to help! :)
Unfortunately, images uploaded to this forum are only visible to the person who posted them and to Dell reps, so I can't see the error codes -- but yes, if you've already messed with partitions, I'm not too surprised that ReagentC is throwing errors. The purpose of ReagentC is to enable and disable the Windows Recovery function and to specify which partition that environment lives on, but sometimes if it was active when you change something and then you break it, getting it set up properly again can be a bit tricky. If you'll be performing a clean install anyway though, I wouldn't worry about it, and if you capture image backups of your disk anyway, then chances are you won't even need it.
Yes, UEFI systems and Legacy BIOS systems work quite differently. A UEFI system requires the EFI, MSR, and OS partitions. The Recovery partition technically isn't required, but it's created by default during Windows Setup, and even if you delete it later, it will get recreated whenever you upgrade to a new Windows 10 release, so you may as well keep it. If you erase your disk and then run Windows Setup, it will create partitions in this order: Recovery, EFI, MSR, OS. At that point, you can go ahead and shrink the OS partition to create your D drive. Whenever you need a larger Recovery partition during a Windows 10 upgrade, then Windows will shrink your C drive again so that you'll end up with this layout: Recovery (deprecated), EFI, MSR, OS, Recovery (active), D drive. That's what you want. Again, technically if you perform a fully manual command-line installation of Windows, including custom disk partitioning, you can avoid having a Recovery partition first on your disk and manually create it after your C drive from the beginning, but that's a bit more effort, so I don't normally recommend that except for picky/advanced users and larger system deployment scenarios. Good luck!
jphughan
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June 6th, 2018 17:00
Yes, if you're willing to do a clean install each time, then you won't have this issue. I used to do clean installs for each new version of Windows, but now that Microsoft has said they'll be issuing a new version every March and September, I'm not willing to do a clean install every 6 months, so instead I just capture an image backup before upgrading and then only perform a clean install if I have a problem that I think a clean install will fix.
Fyi though there's absolutely no point formatting a partition if you're going to delete it. Formatting just creates a file system and if you do NOT perform a quick format, it will also scan the disk surface and note any problematic areas, but if you delete the partition immediately after, you lose the file system and the record of the problematic areas. Just delete the partitions. :)
Michael_ACL
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June 6th, 2018 17:00
Oh, now I understand. Well, another thing I forgot to mention is that, I usually clean install each time Windows throws a major OS Update (creators update as to mention an example). I download the .iso and burn it with rufus on a USB stick.
So, what I do is format and delete each partition, wipe every single drive except my data so it leaves a large amount of unallocated space. Usually it looks like this on Windows Setup:
Unallocated Space
Drive D
So, I think I shouldn't have to worry about the possibility of having 2 Recovery partitions if I do it like this?
jphughan
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June 6th, 2018 17:00
No, it doesn't create a deprecated Recovery partition, and you can't extend C into that space. Allow me to explain:
When you first install Windows, you get this partition layout: Recovery, EFI, MSR, OS.
When you later upgrade to a new version of Windows, it's possible that the new version will require a larger Recovery partition than the original installation created. It's not possible to extend the existing Recovery partition since there isn't any unallocated space immediately after it. So instead, Windows shrinks your OS partition by the amount required for a new Recovery partition, creates a new partition there, and that new partition becomes your Recovery partition. At that point, you have this layout: Recovery (old), EFI, MSR, OS, Recovery (new).
At this point, technically you can delete the old Recovery partition since it's not being used anymore, but then you would end up with unallocated space at the very beginning of the disk, which means you can't use it to extend any other partitions. That's why it just gets left there doing nothing.