Windows 10: Windows 10 Pro (Format the Factory Restore drive D for other uses?

I Bought an HP Pavilion Slimline (s5310f) computer in 2010 with Windows 7 Factory installed OS. Than I upgraded to Windows 7 Ultimate OS.


Installed Windows 10 Pro.


I deleted Windows/OLD.


What is in the Factory Image that shows up in MY PC files ? It is also listed in System Restore?
Is it Windows 10 Pro or Windows 7 that originally came with purchase.


I read somewhere that Windows 10 does not have a Factory Restore only Recovery.


http://www.howtogeek.com/220986/how-...ecovery-tools/


Is it safe to format the Factory Restore drive D for other uses?


Any answers greatly appreciated.

:)

 

format a disk drive

If I format a HDD (my D: drive) with an OEM partition and a recovery partition on it, will the formatting wipe out the partitions?

Running Windows 10 Pro from C: drive. My D: drive is a Seagate 2TB that came with the pc (Dell) and had Windows 7 Pro on it. I put a SSD in and upgraded to Windows 10 Pro.

Any help for this 80 year old would be appreciated!

 

Windows 10 two copies on PC

on Drive c there is factory (Dell) installed Windows 10.

on drive d I have installed my own copy Windows 10 pro.

Machine boots with UEFI and Factory Win 10 loads.

machine boots with Legacy and I changed boot order, Win 10 Pro.

How do I combine the two different Windows and run only the Win10 pro?

 

Being of sound mind I had made the factory restore discs when prompted in setting up a couple of Notebooks then when I Upgraded them to Win10 I did use Disk Management to delete that partition [and data in it], gave me additional storage. The thing is, as I understand it, is that the Product Key gets associated with Win10 and the restore function is no longer available. Perhaps putting in a new HDD and then using the restore discs will work but Activation may be an issue.

 

You understand incorrectly. The Windows 7 product key does not get associated with Windows 10 in any way.

 

I am more confused than ever. Simple question was what was on the Factory restore drive. Perhaps no one knows and if that is the situation I will leave it alone. Since I deleted windows Old which had Windows 7 on it I have nothing to restore from.
Is there a way to see the files in Factory Restore D Drive ? It has approximately 10 GB on it.

 

The Factory image is to return to Windows 7 using the recovery utility (losing all your data and programs). If you don't mind, create recovery disks for Windows 10, in case you need them in the future, and delete the Factory image partition and the recovery partition to gain space. When you delete them there will be unallocated space. Right-click on the Windows partition and select Extend Volume to take all the unallocated space.

 

The small 1/2 GB recovery partition will have the Windows 10 recovery environment on it - you can repair boot issues with it, but not install Windows 10 from it. The Factory Image partition contains the Windows 7 image necessary to restore back to Windows 7. I ended up in the same situation and actually combined the two. I took the install.wim file from the Factory Image partition and copied it, then deleted factory image partition and expanded the smaller recovery partition into the free space. Then I copied the install.wim file into the newly expanded recovery partition and set reagentc.exe to see it as the OS image. Then shrunk the recovery partition to the smallest size possible.

So, I ended up with a Windows 10 recovery partition that, if I picked restore, would restore my computer back to the Windows 8.1 that it came from the factory with.

 

I would make sure that Windows 10 work without any issues. Then take a full system backup or clone the disk on a spare. Then delete any recovery partitions and extend Windows to take the whole disk. If you have enough free space, you can just forget about it for the time being as it is rather advanced and sounds like a lot of trouble.

 

So, it's not like I am running low on space. If I just formatted the Factory Restore D I would have a bit of extra space for say special files ? I will make sure to have a Windows 10 clone on USB beforehand.
Thank you for all replies, mucho appreciated.

 

So even though I deleted Windows/Old files when I upgraded to Windows 10 you are saying Windows 7 still resides in Factory restore on my D drive ?

 

Yes. But you can't do a simple revert back to Windows 7. You would have to do a full system restore. You may or may not be required to enter the Windows 7 product key for that.

 

As I use other means of backing windows up, I collected and merged all the "extra" partitions and left only System Reserved at the beginning of BOOT disk + C:/. I ended up with 6 partitions after upgrade from W7 to 8, to 8.1 and finally to 10. Every upgrade seems to leave another useless partition.

 

So I did my Recovery system backup on USB, set to go. I made the USB Windows 10 Install from Media Tool in case I ever need to install a clean Windows 10. I reformatted the Factory Restore and as it was formatting noticed familiar Windows 7 programs going bye Bye forever *Smile Cyberlink and all the other crap that discombobulated the system *Smile

You have helped me tremendously and I am glad to have found this forum.

 

Those brand name computers are so full of crap programs that sometimes I'm flabbergasted how the heck do they work at all. They eat half the free RAM and processor cycles. Good riddance of them, nothing like nice, clean system.