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Can/should I delete my OEM and Recovery Partitions?

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My Dell laptop is 5 years old and I'm planning to replace the internal SSD (C: drive) just out of caution for its age. Given that I backup my drive every day with ATI2020, I wonder: Can I copy the C: partition alone to the new drive and abandon the 39MB OEM partition, and the 13.29 GB Recovery partition in the process? Or is there something in either/both of these that enables the C: partition to boot?

I know that 13 GB is not a lot of space on a 240GB SSD, but "inquiring minds need to know"!

p.s. FWIW my SSD currently is an MBR disk with a GUID partition table not GPT. Dunno much about GPT but I don't need multiple partions.

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Tom, the 39MB OEM partition on your Dell laptop is most likely to be for Dell Diagnostics that can be launched from the BIOS panels and used to test the internal hardware components.

The 13.29 GB Recovery partition is intended to allow you to do a factory reset of the laptop and put it back to whatever OS version it came installed with when you first got it, i.e. either an earlier version of Windows 10 or perhaps 7 or 8.  That partition could be removed if you are wanting to recover the space used and removing it should not cause any issues as the partition is normally positioned at the end of the drive.

If your laptop supports both Legacy and UEFI boot, then the main reason for using the latter (along with GPT partitioning) is if you wish to try to upgrade to Windows 11.  By default Win 11 needs TPM 2.0 along with a recent CPU specification which your laptop may not meet.

Awesome reply many thanks for that Steve! I am gonna delete the Recovery partition and teave the little OEM alone then. I do have Legacy and UEFI and TPM 2.0 etc and it's an i7, but I dunno why I would ever want to move off my x64 W7 Pro OS. At least, it's hard for me to imagine some program I would want to run in W11 that wouldn't also require upgraded hardware all-around.

Thanks again.

 When I first got my Dell laptop (Win7), I used Dell's utility to create Recovery disks. They will enable restoration of the drive to its original delivered state, if I ever wanted to sell the laptop in that new state.

I then deleted the Recovery partition, for three reasons: I wanted to free up that large chunk of space;  I wanted to simplify the partition layout; and, I had no use for that partition. After configuring Windows to my liking, installing apps, changing settings, etc., a solution to a disk disaster would not be to restore the laptop to factory-original state. If I have a disaster then that's what my ATI disk images are for.

TomF wrote:

I dunno why I would ever want to move off my x64 W7 Pro OS. At least, it's hard for me to imagine some program I would want to run in W11 that wouldn't also require upgraded hardware all-around

 

I had Win7 and liked it. But, it's past EOL so there are no ongoing security updates. That makes Win7 a security risk. I upgraded to Win10 which, due to Win10's better memory management, often runs better than Win7 even on an older PC. My old laptop runs well, and I needed to do very little to make my old applications and drivers compatible with Win10.

Thanks for that tuttle. You know, I have to start digging through my shiny discs because I think I might have done as you when I first got my laptop.

Yeah SS spoke of "factory reset" but it simply never occurred to me that I might ever sell this, especially as I have a spare chassis for it. But I suppose I might.

I have quite an investment in the E6540 in that I first got it to transport between winter and summer homes, but then I got expansion ports for both places i.e. snap-in and snap-out and it's quite a nice setup.

Ain't gonna do the W10 thing. And FWIW I have 0patch running so there's that.