Windows 10: Can the OEM Recovery partition be left on Disk 1 and OS on Disk 0?

Thnx for the heads up. I took your advice and formatted the SSD & did a clean install of Windows 10 ver. 1709 on there. I then deleted the OS partition from the 1TB hdd and left the OEM recovery partitions, in case my friend wants to use it someday.

PC runs much faster now (as expected).

Marking this thread as solved *Smile

 

A friend of mine had his Lenovo PC serviced and the OS had to be reinstalled. Once he received it, we found out the OS was put on the regular 1TB HDD and the 256GB M.2 SATA SSD left as the "extra storage." *sarc Not surprisingly, he was complaining about speed.

So already have my tools ready for cloning (a.k.a MReflect) but had a question...Can the OEM partitions be left on the regular HDD and only the OS migrated? Or do I have to clone the current 1TB HDD as-is to the 256GB SSD in order to not loose the Lenovo One-Key recovery function?

The only partition I don't believe needs to be cloned is the 25GB [D:] drive as it contains the drivers. So I think that can stay on Disk 1.

Picture below to convey the current setup...





:)

 

Clean installing windows 10

A clean install only erases the partition that you'll be using to install Windows. However, Windows 10 will create its own recovery partition - so you can reset or refresh Windows 10 - and that may over-write your OEM recovery partition.

Whether or not your OEM recovery partition will be overwritten depends on how the OEM setup its recovery utility. You can always ask your computer manufacturer whether Windows 10 will overwrite the OEM recovery partition.

This is just a suggestion: If you're not in a big hurry to install Windows 10 (and why would you be?) then you can learn to make a disk image backup. With a disk image, you can quickly return to your old operating system even without the OEM recovery partition.
In fact, the image solution is even better, because the image is a copy of the way your hard disk is now, while the OEM factory recovery takes you back to the first day you brought the computer home.

 

Windows 10 & Too many Recovery partitions

Yes Disk 0 has 5 partitions

Disk 1 has 2 partitions

Disk 0

Keep 1, 3 and 5

Delete 2 and 4

Disk 1

that is quite a huge recovery partition 20GB

Maybe it is your 8 OS (with the out of box recovery)

 

Frankly, I would not bother with the Lenovo one-key recovery. I got rid of mine years ago. That only puts pc back to its initial state which is a waste of time, as you get a new windows build Every six months and eventually old ones are no longer supported.

I would just clean install Windows 10 on sdd (deleting all partitions on ssd) as you do not have much installed yet then delete all but perhaps the D drive (I doubt you even need this).

 

You make a good point about the One-Key recovery because the current Windows 10 version on the PC is build 10240 (ver. 1507)*Huh That's going to be a lot of Windows updates...

 

Actually, it is only one - you do not have to go through intermediate versions. The only point of a one-key recovery is to reinstate all the vendor crapware. If I remember correctly you can make a backup to an external drive if you ever really wanted to go back. IMO, that is just a waste of time - Macrium Reflect can backup things much better, and include programs etc.