Windows 10: Partition help please

I congratulate those who have well running W10 systems. But at the same time I see a lot of reports about problems. And as long nobody can explain to me why I should have Win 10, I stay with Win7 which runs perfectly since day1..

 

onefish, I think capturing the factory restore partition on a flash drive before deleting it as NavyLCDR suggested is a good hedge. I couldn't tell you off the top of my head but I thing there MIGHT be a way to make the partition useable if it came down to it. I don't know Lenovos well enough but I know it's doable for Dells - I wouldn't need to as I made separate factory restore media as soon as I got my system and then blew away the partition. I know there is a way to generically have an image on a partition that the WinRE is linked to and to use that image for a restore - but again I can't speak precisely to your case and how the Lenovo restore is implemented.

OTOH, since your disk real estate is so precious and IF your dead certain you don't have any need for the factory restore, that's quite a chunk of space you can recoup even at the risk of never regaining factory restore capability. By all means, though, having an archival full disk image to fall back on if anything goes wrong is a must in my book.

Now, I see topgundcp nearby and would be interested to see any comment he may have on this.*Nerd

 

Windows 10 reaches 200 million devices | TechRadar

I guess it depends on what your definition of "a lot" is.

 

A lot is appr. half of the postings I read about W10. In my book that is 50%.

And I am not impressed by the 200 million number. Who knows how many of those are really runnimg and even then, 200 million is appr. 15% of the Windows population. Of all PCs it is appr. 10% and less than XP.

 

Anywhoo.... the OP already upgraded to Windows 10 with no problems so it's sort of a moot point for this thread.

 

Don't want to derail this thread too far. I think I have probably got the advice I was seeking. Thank you all for contributing!

whs, I am inclined to agree with you regarding upgrading. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. One compelling reason for Win 10 though is a 10" touchscreen tablet PC. Win 7 is so so painful on such a device, just not made for it.

 

The touchscreen point is a very good argument. Thanks for pointing that out.

 

This is what my Nextbook Flexx 10 tablet looks like. I have the original Windows 8.1 Bing entire 32gb memory image created from Macrium Reflect Free stored on a NAS.





I even deleted that 16mb "MSR" partition that everyone says is needed on a GPT disk.

 

FYI, From the reagentc output in post #4. The location of the factory Image is already broken due to creation of additional 450MB Recovery Partition. Otherwise, it should have shown the location of the 5.1 GB Image. Same as for Recovery partition. Since you don't care about this. It can be ignored.

On a new laptop. If you run bcdedit /enum all. You should see the entries on how they set up the custom function key to invoke this partition.
Example:
bcdedit.exe /SET {BOOTMGR} custom:0x54000001 %guid%
bcdedit.exe /SET {BOOTMGR} customactions 0x1000085000001 0x54000001

F11 ===> 0x8500

Yep.

 

I suppose you could point reagentc /setosimage to the install.wim on the 5.1 GB image and then Windows reset would probably go back to the original factory OS.

 

Yep, I suppose you could do that.

 

Just a quick followup as something a bit unexpected happened while removing the restore. It looks like Windows 10 is actually smarter than I expected it to be. Firstly, I removed the previous Windows versions via the disk cleanup tool. Then I downloaded Minitool Partition Wizard and watched a couple tutorial vids so that I'd know how to delete, move and resize partitions with it. But when I opened it up the 5.1GB partition is gone and the space already allocated to C: It looks like the disk cleanup tool not only removed the Windows.old folder from C: but it also removed the Win 8.1 restore partition and re-allocated the space. I checked with diskpart and it looks to be accurate. Who'd have thought aye!