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What are the partitions of my XPS 8700's hard drive for?
I have an XPS 8700 that came with Windows 8, and I've upgraded it to 8.1.
I'm in the process of setting it up as a dual-boot Win8.1/Ubuntu machine, and was surprised when I looked at the partition table. I can tell what some of the partitions are, but what about the rest? (Forgive the Linux partition names.)
Thanks!
Doug
| Partition | Type | Size | Used | Comments |
| free space | 1M | |||
| /dev/sda1 | efi | 524M | 53M | UEFI boot? |
| /dev/sda2 | fat32 | 41M | 41M | |
| /dev/sda3 | 134M | |||
| /dev/sda4 | ntfs | 513M | 293M | |
| /dev/sda5 | ntfs | 985G | 53G | C: |
| /dev/sda6 | ntfs | 367M | 299M | |
| /dev/sda7 | ntfs | 14G | 13G | factory image? |
| free space | 1M |
ejn63
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February 11th, 2014 05:00
The 41M partition is the Dell diagnostics. The other partitions are used for the Dell recovery software (293M, 299M and 13G) to recover the factory configuration.
Bear in mind that if you alter the GPT structure, the quick restore will no longer function - so if you will need to do a recovery, be sure you make a recovery medium BEFORE you do anything else. Also be sure your linux distribution supports GPT (not all do).
dkon
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February 11th, 2014 20:00
EJN63,
Thanks for the info. I have one question - If the only change I make is to split the partition holding C: into two, so I can have one Windows and one Linux partition, will I still break GPT? (I have already created my backup media, and I'm installing Ubuntu, which is compatible with UEFI.)
Thanks
Doug
ejn63
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February 12th, 2014 05:00
It won't break GPT but will render the quick restore unusable, so make a backup/recovery flash drive first.