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May 15th, 2018 09:00

OEM 40MB partition filling up

For some odd reason, my OEM partition is filling up and is very close to the maximum:

2018-05-15_9-14-55.png

My laptop is an Inspiron 13, 7000 Series, Model 7378.

  • Why would this begin filling up?
  • How can I rectify the problem?
  • Can I removed the partition? I use EaseUS for backup and do not care about Windows recovery (nor do I trust it).

 

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May 15th, 2018 10:00

Fyi, image uploads to this forum are only visible to the person who posted them and to Dell reps, so I can't see what you're seeing.  But if you recently upgraded to Windows 10 1803, it seems that in some cases the Recovery and/or OEM partitions that are normally supposed to be hidden are getting assigned drive letters and triggering low space warnings.  Those partitions aren't really filling up; they've always been close to the maximum because they don't normally grow, but Windows was ignoring them while they didn't have a drive letter assigned.  You can remove the drive letter by following the steps in this article.

As for deleting, yes you can delete that OEM partition, but it's not in a space that would allow you to repurpose that storage anywhere else in a useful way, even if 40 MB was a worthwhile amount of storage to repurpose in the first place, so I wouldn't bother.  But if you ever did a clean install or an image restore, you could certainly delete/omit that partition.  As for the Windows Recovery partition, that's a separate entity.  Even if you never use it, Windows will recreate it during every Windows 10 release upgrade if it doesn't exist, and in some cases it's required if you use BitLocker, so I would just leave it there even if you never intend to use it.

1 Rookie

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May 15th, 2018 11:00

You nailed this - THANKS! I used fix#1 as I am familiar with DiskPart.

Why-oh-why-oh-why does Microsoft do stupid things?

August 2nd, 2018 18:00

Thanks for pointing us in the right direction. This was getting annoying!

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August 3rd, 2018 04:00

The title of the post was confusing since it was not a 40 MB partition being effected.  There are many threads about the extra drive letter being added in error after the Win 10 build upgrade.

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