Hard drive partitions

[QuentinJ]

Hi,

I love my Surface Pro, I'm considering upgrading to SP3 or waiting until SP4 and my SP will be great for my mother.
Anyways, I've done soft and hard resets on my SP since I've had it; I looked at the partitions on the hard drive now: (in French sorry :/, I removed my microSD and USB to only show the SSD)
It seems there are a few "recovery partitions" of 600MB, 450MB & 350MB (total of 1400MB). The recovery partition is the 7.62GB one I think and I was wondering whether it would be safe to remove those small partitions to get the 1400MB back on my main partition?
Also, does anyone have any suggestions as to how to remove those partitions?
Thanks a lot for the help!

 

[Ronald Reed]

I have got the most useful recovery software to restore lost partition data on computer hard drive. Just have a look, How to Recover Lost Hard Drive Partition on Windows - YouTube

 

[xandros9]

I don't think it would be smart to remove thouse. But if you want to experiment, be sure to back them up exactly as they were using something, like Reflect.

 

[QuentinJ]

Thanks for the help. I posted on the Microsoft community forums as well and was advised to leave the partitions there but thanks for the video Ronald Reed, I will use this on another computer.

No one has been able to tell me however why there needs to be numerous partitions as opposed to just one...

 

[xandros9]

Thanks for the help. I posted on the Microsoft community forums as well and was advised to leave the partitions there but thanks for the video Ronald Reed, I will use this on another computer.

No one has been able to tell me however why there needs to be numerous partitions as opposed to just one...

My best guess is that they probably mirror the other couple partitions that are in actual use.

 

[David P2]

One of the partitions is the EFI boot partition - if that goes walkabouts, the machine will no longer boot. A couple of others are system related (one is part of Windows Recovery, but not linked to the restore image partition). For the sake of getting 1.4GB back on such a large disk, it's definitely not worth the hassle and wasted time. Especially when you have the ability to plug in things like SD cards, USB stick and external HDDs, and cloud based storage which can give you up to a hundred times more storage than a measly 1 gig. It's like doing a certain bodily function into the ocean - makes zero difference to how much liquid is there.

Bottom line - if you're unsure as to the function of something - especially with something critical like disk partitions, leave well alone.

 

[QuentinJ]

Thanks for the answer, I have my SP now but I actually had a blank space of a couple GB on my old laptop so the question poped back in my mind. With a 64GB SD (soon upgrading to 128GB), a 128GB SSD and over 1.1TB of OneDrive space, I don't need that one gig, just curious
Thanks for the explanation

 

[QuentinJ]

Update on the issue:
I opened the disk defrag tool the other day and I've noticed extra volumes which I think may be linked to those extra partitions:

Thanks again for everyone that helped. Now I wonder how those extra volumes came about...

 

[switch side method]

Disk defrag would be ok to do to get a bit more space back but as said I would leave it alone and not delete. Its like that in all systems. Even on smartphones there will always be space taken up by the OS....you delete just one and it will muck up. And as also mentioned you have SD cards, usb, cloud, external hard drives and cds and DVDs to save data on. If it helps there are sites such as play.com that does external dvd drives brand new for ?13 that connects via usb so may be worth checking that out

 

[RajeevT]

If it bothers you a lot and if you're willing to start over, the following may help (untested):

1. Create a USB recovery drive
2. Boot from and reset the tablet using the USB drive, making sure to select the Yes, repartition the drives and Fully clean the drive options

If you do it let us know the results.