Windows 10, can I ditch my 8.1 recovery partition?

[mjgerrard]

Hey guys. I read that Win10 has a rather clever way of being able to perform the same sort of bare metal restore as the recovery partition on my 64GB Surface 3. Would anyone mind explaining if this works, what your experience was as an insider, and whether its worth the risk of ditching the recovery pt? I could always back it up to a USB stick I guess...

 

[RumoredNow]

I created a USB stick for 8.1 install with this tool... Create installation media for Windows 8.1 - Windows Help

And captured my License Key with this tool... ProduKey - Recover lost product key (CD-Key) of Windows/MS-Office/SQL Server

Here's all I did to prepare, along with some suggestions from others... http://forums.windowscentral.com/windows-10-how-guides/369682-what-you-doing-prep-windows-10-a.html

 

[illidanx]

Hey guys. I read that Win10 has a rather clever way of being able to perform the same sort of bare metal restore as the recovery partition on my 64GB Surface 3. Would anyone mind explaining if this works, what your experience was as an insider, and whether its worth the risk of ditching the recovery pt? I could always back it up to a USB stick I guess...

When you do a reset on W10, W10 keeps only the original system files, presumably with an integrity check, and delete everything else, so you don't need a separate recovery partition. You can even create a recovery drive from nothing in windows 10, just search create recovery drive and check "Copy system files" but I don't think you need this recovery drive to reset windows; you just need it if you want to clean install windows. I would keep the W8.1 recovery partition for a while though in case the W10 recovery drive I create is corrupted.

 

[mjgerrard]

Thanks very much. Top advice.