Windows 10: Is there any point keeping my laptop's recovery partition?

My toshiba laptop came preinstalled with windows 7 home premium and has, as I expect all modern laptops do, a hidden recovery partition (it's 400MB in size). Though for some reason it also has visible primary partition along side the Windows C: partition that contains an "HDDRecovery" folder about 7.5GB in size, inside of which is a file saying not to modify or delete it as it could "damage the recovery system". The D: drive is 116GB in size, identical to the C: drive, so basically it's half the size of the HDD in this laptop (which is around 250GB - this laptop is getting on a bit incidentally).

After upgrading to windows 10, a few things seemed a bit broken so I decided the recover the laptop but I couldn't, as the recovery system was also apparently broken. The option for recovery in settings doesn't give me the choice to access the toshiba recovery system anymore. In windows 7 all I had to do was press F8 before windows loaded to get into the advanced boot options menu and choose repair and go from there but that no longer works either. I've been reading how win10 did away with recovery options, or something along those lines so presumably that's why it no longer works. So as and when I do come back to windows 10, will there be any point in keeping the D partition?

What with it taking up half the hard disc for some reason (a "brilliant" idea by Toshiba no doubt), I won't miss it if it's gone but I just wanted to check it is indeed rendered useless by windows 10, or I had done something wrong to make it stop working?

:)

 

Is there really any point in getting the Facebook app for the people hub to show Facebook posts on the Windows Phone 8.1 Developer Preview?

Having the app do the integration means it can be updated independently of the OS. Now new features won't lag behind too much on WP waiting for Microsoft to update it and then wait for carriers to stop being idiots.

 

Is there really any point in getting the Facebook app for the people hub to show Facebook posts on the Windows Phone 8.1 Developer Preview?

The Windows Phone 8.1 Developer Preview it's very good. I have loved it since yesterday. Everything has changed for the better! But, I just don't see the point in having the Facebook app to show Facebook posts on the people hub. I liked the way that on
Windows Phone 8.0, you don't have to get the app. You can just link the Facebook account you already have and its there on the people hub. Please sort this for the full and working public release of Windows Phone 8.1!

 

400MB is to small for a recovery partition.
Your D: is to big for a recovery partition.

Post a snapshot of a fullscreen Disk Management Window:
To open Disk Management, press Windows key+r, type diskmgmt.msc and press Enter or click GO. Make it full screen. Expand the fields as necessary so everything can be seen.

How to Take a Screenshot in Windows 10
How to Use the Snipping Tool in Vista - Vista Forums (says it's for Vista but also works with Win 7/8).

 

I have no recovery partition now as I updated Windows 7 to 10 and 7 never had one. When I was using The TP builds and did a clean install it would create a 500mb recovery section.

 

I think that that partition is created whenever Windows 10 is installed. I have a 450 mb "Recovery" partition, clean install.

 

It probably is on a clean install

 

I didn't look to see if the recovery partition had been removed by windows 10. This is what it looks like now I've recovered to windows 7 and what I was referring to. Although I don't know if it's telling the truth but I've just noticed that hidden recovery partition appears to be empty, so as suggested probably created by windows for whatever reason and not actually used?




When I installed windows 10 I did it through the media creation tool because the upgrade kept failing in windows update, and I couldn't be bothered to wait for it anyway. I didn't think to look at disk management when windows 10 was running, I'd have thought the install wouldn't have touched any of the partitions though for integrity sake? That's weird then. If the recovery partition is empty then the link to recovery media must be on C drive, in windows 7 since windows 10's install didn't touch the D drive. Although I don't know if the recovery partition was still there, D drive definitely was and all the recovery data was still in it.

 

Well having done a lot of Googling I've come to the conclusion that the answer to my original question is, no. There isn't any point keeping the recovery system intact as it is in fact rendered useless by the Windows 10 install, hence why it wouldn't work when I tried it evidentaly - I hadn't done anything wrong afterall. I've created recovery media using Toshiba's tools so I have it if I need it in the future but for now I'll let the upgrade come along on its own so I can finally get the activation to work and then do a clean install of Windows 10, and wipe the entire hard disc in the process.

Incidentally for those wondering apparently Windows 10 does make a hidden recovery partition 350MB in size but only if you clean install and only if you first wipe the HDD so it's all unallocated space when choosing the disc to install Windows on.

 

Hello. We upgraded seven family PCs to Win-10. One of these from Win-7 and the rest from Win-8. For one Win-8 machine -- which was originally identical to another one -- it went badly. Nothing would run. Minutes and minutes would pass between clicking on an icon and getting a partial result. And there would be no response to clicking for a DOS prompt. SFC, disk management and other maintenance procedures would not run, etc. So I did a clean load following the TenForums 2376-usb-flash-drive-create-install-windows-10-a instructions. This worked. But when I made a system image backup using Win-10's Win-7 tool, I got the message, "New bad clusters were found on the source volume. These clusters were not backed up. (0x8078007D)". So now I notice that there are a number of small (400 and 1000MB) and large (16.5GB) but empty (100% free) recovery partitions, plus an empty 300MB EFI partition. Back in 2013, the recovery partition had a copy of the original Win-8 recovery files. But now they are apparently gone, and I am not really bothered to see them go, as I do not intend to return to 2013 again. Is it OK / will it help, to wipe and delete all these partitions on our machines? And / or should I replace them with something else?

 

I'd leave it, just in case. As it is, it looks like both of your C and D partitions are Primary, but your boot is on drive C. Does it show you a boot options menu (of boot choices)?

 

Hello. Sorry. The printscreen above is not from one of my PCs. For my troubled PC, the partition with the 16GB is not even mapped to a drive anymore. Previously there was a 16GB partition with the original Win-8 recovery that was mapped to D:. Now after a clean load of Win-10, there is also a new empty 1GB recovery partition between the C: partition and the empty 16GB recovery partition. Both of these partitions are labelled as "healthy recovery partitions". But, interestingly, using windows disk management software, I cannot do anything with them. When I right-click on them, the only option is "help". No mapping options or anything else. I am assuming though that I could do something with them using MiniTool Partition Wizard. In some googling, I came up with advice from the days of the Win-7 to Win-8 change to shrink and then to re-expand the C: section by 1GB so as to get rid of the “new bad clusters (0x8078007D)” error message. I have not tried this yet as (1) I am asking for advice here first, and (2) the laptop is with a family member today.

 

Well If I understand you correctly, your hard drive is loosing clusters. You hard drive is crashing and needs to be replaced. Loosing cluster and the data in them will cause all kinds of weird behavior.

 

Hello All, I left the recovery partitions are they were. Indeed they were not empty. And, although I see no need to keep the OEM Windows 8 files from 2013, I can delete them later. We do not use our whole hard disks anyway as we have our media on a NAS server.

What I have done though was to follow the tutorial from DavidY about creating provisioning packages. I then made new recovery USBs using 32GB sticks. For PCs with quite a number of Steam games on them, the 32GB was not enough. So I had the family members delete games that they were not using anymore until I could get the recoveries onto the 32GB sticks. I guess I could have procured some 64GB sticks. But it was time for some clean-up anyway.