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Insp.3891 - Too many "Recovery" partitions _??
My new 3891 desktop has just the single 512 GB NVMe drive which is much larger than I should need. But I'm stymied that looking at the partition sizes, there are nearly 20 GB allocated to 3 "recovery" partitions. Why? Are all those committed to realistic purposes?
(Total HD contents of my old Win 7 PC, used about 168 GB in C: & combined.)
But looking at the new NVMe to see where to create a partition, I'm puzzled. There are 5 "volumes" and only the C: partition is lettered (NTFS format). Here's the graphical order of volumes/ partitions, all shown healthy: (#s below are as noted by Disk Mgmt, look inconsistent; I've indented the smaller, "MB" sizes)
#1 150 MB -(EFI system ptn, shown crosshatched)
456.7 GB -OS (C:) (Windows 10) Disk 0, "online"
#4 990 MB -"Recovery"
#5 17.4 GB -"Recovery"
#6 1.36 GB -"Recovery"
Obvious question: Does it really need all those 3 "Recovery" partitions, and for what?
(Secondly, all volumes shown total about 477 GB; where are the other 35 GB?)
Mainly, can I reallocate some of those latter 19 GB or so, for a partition (and I suppose reduce the size of C: also? (My wife's new Dell 3080 has all her apps on the 256 GB SSD, and my old C: drive on the W7 machine shows only some 100 GB used.)
OR, for apps and their files , do I need to really need to add a second physical drive? (or perhaps Windows 10 likes all apps AND files on the C: partition?)
Thanks for your more-expert tips. The puzzles grew as I added this up.
Spikesdad
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March 10th, 2022 16:00
@LastOneTustin,
The old post linked above is pretty much still applicable. But, yeah, Dell has added even more minor partitions. My wife's Dell 5400 has the same partition layout on her 256 GB SSD drive. The difference being that the main "C:/" partition is only 221 GB (because, well, smaller...), and the second "Recovery Partition" is 14.58 GB instead of 17 GB. There is also a 16 MB unallocated space that, well, just sits there. My son's 3891 with a 256 GB SSD is the same way.
Pretty sure that the 14+ GB partition is the full Windows installation files. Others are likely additional drivers and such that will likely never be needed.
We actually added a 2TB hard drive on my wife's computer because she does a ton of work with audio files and photos, and I knew that 256 wouldn't be nearly enough. I added a 1 TB hard drive to my son's PC.
My PC is one I built, and installing Windows on my 500 GB SSD automatically created only 2 additional partitions besides the primary boot partition. The first EFI System partition that;s only 100 MB, and the ending 508 MB Recovery Partition.
So, it's a Dell thing. I'm sure HP, Acer, and Lenovo do similar things.
It's not a problem to save apps and user data to another drive. I do it on all three of our machines. Most apps let you specify which folder to save to. Saving your data can be a little tricky. But you can generally change the default location for Docs, Pics, Videos, Downloads and 3D Objects by right-clicking on the user folder icons in the File Explorer > click "Properties" > click "Location" tab > then just change C:\Users\your-username\Documents to D:\Users\your-username\Documents. You can just type in the whole path if you want and it will ask to create one if one is not already there, then ask if you want to move the existing files to the new location. Click "yes".
Now, Win 10 and Win 11 both have another default document save location in the main "Settings" > "System" > "Storage" > look for "Change where new content it saved". That only specifies the drive letter to save apps, docs, music, photos and a few other things. But it only sets the drive letter, and doing so creates the D:\your-username\Docs, etc..., and does not use the main "Users" folder first. So changing the drive letter here creates 2 your-username folders. One in the root of the selected drive, and one under the 'Users" folder. And, of course, the "your-username" is usually your MS account or login name.
DELL-Jesse L
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March 14th, 2022 05:00
LastOneTustin,
The space is taken up by the recovery partition.
It is not recommended to remove it from the computer.
DELL-Cares
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March 8th, 2022 23:00
Thank you! We have received the required details. We will work towards a resolution. In the meantime, you may also receive assistance or suggestions from the community members.
NJDave
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March 9th, 2022 12:00
Someone took a swing at this awhile ago, here. I think the info provided is all still true. You always have the option of reinstalling Windows from installation media; this will wipe your SSD and reinstall Windows on a larger C partition, while creating just the one <1GB Windows recovery partition. All the drivers and factory-installed software should be available via SupportAssist and/or Drivers & Downloads. Of course you'd need to back up your personal files first.
To your question, "Where are the other 35 GB?": Storage vendors have, unfortunately, always measured megabytes and gigabytes differently from the rest of the computing world, and this confusion really should be addressed by the various tools we use to manage storage. The storage vendors' version of a gigabyte is 10 billion bytes, while the version as Windows sees it is 1,073,741,824, or 2 to the 30th power, bytes. (The same with megabytes: 10 million vs. 2-to-the-20th bytes.) If you divide 512,000,000,000 by 1,073,741,824 you'll see you get around 477.
The powers-of-2 versions of these units are now (also) called mebibytes and gibibytes, abbreviated MiB and GiB, and it looks like megabyte and gigabyte will eventually refer exclusively to the powers-of-10 versions, but apparently not yet.