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Recovery choice: Entire disk or OS partition?

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I was "forced" to do a recovery of my PC due to my own negligence. The recovery went smoothly and the machine seems to be working correctly since then.

But it wasn't until afterward that I wondered if recovering the other 4 partitions might have been called for too.

I have no real idea of what's in those other partitions, other than that 3 of them are labeled as "recovery" partitions. I assumed that they contain data to restore the machine back to its state at purchase, but now wonder if they might be updated as the machine us updated.

Are the partitions changed over time or are they static? Is a full disk recovery necessary, a good idea or just a waste of time?

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Bert, with the MVP Assistant you can get a better idea of the other partitions (System Configuration section). Although there may be multiple Recovery partitions, there should be one WinRE partition which can get updated by major Windows updates. This partition will most likely follow the OS partition.

On my system, the disk has 5 partitions:

Partition 1 is labeled Recovery, type Microsoft Recovery
Partition 2 is boot partition
Partition 3 is a small hidden Microsoft Reserved partition
Partition 4 is C:
Partition 5 is type Microsoft Recovery and also the WinRE location

I think you did right by restoring the whole disk.

Bert, I agree with Bruno. Better to be safe than sorry.

Ian