Unsolved
70 Posts
0
476
Duplicate System Partitions on HDD and SSD
I have an Inspiron 15 5570, my family purchased around december. When we got it it had boot issues, and I reinstalled windows 10 using the OS Recovery Tool. Its been like this for a while, but it has "Windows RE Tools" (1.7GB) and an unnamed 100MB partition on both disks (1TB HDD and 128GB Boot SSD). What are these partitions for and is there any side affect if I replaced the HDD or Deleted the partitions off the HDD?
jphughan
9 Legend
9 Legend
•
14K Posts
0
April 11th, 2019 21:00
The 100MB partition is the ESP, or EFI System Partition. It's required on any disks that contain an OS meant to be booted in UEFI mode, which is true of practically every system made over the last few years. If you delete that partition, your system won't be bootable. It's necessary because UEFI systems boot in a completely different way from Legacy BIOS systems. The "RE" in Windows RE Tools stands for Recovery Environment. It contains some tools that can be useful for recovering from a system that becomes unbootable, such as might occur after a Windows update or driver update that didn't go to plan. Those tools include things like Command Prompt, System Restore, System Image Restore, Automatic Startup Repair, etc. Technically you can delete it, but that will remove that capability (as well as Automatic Startup Repair that starts automatically if your system fails to boot into Windows twice in a row), and the Recovery partition will get recreated every time you upgrade to a new release of Windows 10 if you don't have it, so you may as well just leave it.
Saltgrass
3 Apprentice
3 Apprentice
•
4.3K Posts
0
April 12th, 2019 06:00
It would be helpful for us if you could get a snipping tool picture of your Disk Management window and attach or put it on your OneDrive and give us a link.
If you attach a picture, it may take a while for us to be able to view it, so be patient.