Can/should I delete my OEM and Recovery Partitions?
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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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.
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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.
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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.
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