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Delete 'H' partition?

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My PC runs Win8 64bit and TI 2014 standard. I bought it 10 months ago with Win 8 already installed. On my 'C' SSD drive there is an 'H' partition which according to my file manager is empty. When I image the drive I do it in 'disc' mode which of course includes the 'H' partition. Today I had a problem which needed the restoration of an image so I restored 'only' the 'C' drive and not the 'H' partition and it worked perfectly. So my question is: Can I delete the 'H' partition safely? If so A. How do I do that? B. How can I incorporate that space back in to the 'C' drive?

Thank you.

Peter

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It depends what is on H:. H: may contain the boot files.

Launch Windows Disk Management, take a screenshot of it showing all drives, and post it here.

Diffucult to answer without a visual. Maybe post a picture of the disk as displayed inside Windows Disk Management graphical view.

Also, Maybe look at the disk via the Windows Disklpart command as via this link.
http://forum.acronis.com/system/files/resize/mvp/user285/misc/show-disk…

Thank you both for your time, much appreciated. When I right click on the 'H' partition and choose 'explore' it says 'This folder is empty'. DiskPart does not display the 'H' partition.

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H: is the Active partition, so boot begins there. You must copy all boot files to your OS partition and mark it Active before you can safely delete H:.

Part 1:
The Windoows Disk management command provided the information we need.
If you delete partition H, you will lose the ability to boot your disk.

This is your System Reserved Partition and is your ACTIVE partition.
This partition does not normally have a drive letter assigned and you need to remove letter H so the partition becomes non-lettered again.

The removal of the drive letter H can be done from within Windows Disk Management. From inside Disk Management,

Right click on Drive H (system reserved) partition and remove the drive letter so no drive letter is assigned.

Part 2:
The system reserved partition needs to be part of each of system backups. If you ever need to create a replacment disk, this system reserved will need to be part of the restore process. I suggest your backup process be a "disk mode" backup rather than a "partition mode" process. Click on link #2 below and look at the first few pictures to have an illustration of the difference.

System Reserved does not need to be part of a restore process if you are just freshening or restoring Drive C to an earlier state. If however, you are having boot problems or need to create a new disk, then the system restore partition needs to be part of the restore.
Link 3 below, items 1, 2 and 3 discuss these needs.

Part 3:
The reason diskpart did not show the information was that
Your Diskpart commands were incomplete. The command below is what was needed, but the info is not needed now as the disk management command provided what was needed.

First command is open the program
DISKPART

Second command is display disk informtion
LIST DISK

Third command is display info only about disk 1 which is the SSD
SELECT DISK 1

Fourth command is provide partition information about Disk 1.
LIST PARTITION

Part 4: After posting my response,
I note the just posted response by MVP Tuttle which is a different approach.
Yes, as he has indicated, you can copy the contents of H into C and with other changes you can eventually delete H.
However, the size of H is peanuts (350mb) and will not add any worthwhile storage space. Frankly, the effort to get rid of H is not worth the bother as there is really little to be gained--but it is a matter of choice.

Grover is right. 350 MB isn't worth worrying about. On my system it was worthwhile to remove Dell's hidden
boot partition, as it was 20 GB.

Make sure always to create full disk mode backups so that you can restore to a new drive and have a bootable system.

Thank you both again. I changed the 'reserved partition' H to having no drive letter. Invoked another image and it worked perfectly. I haven't restored it yet as I like to 'leave sleeping dogs lie' I did a test restore without actually restoring and I had three options to restore: Boot Disk C, Reserved partition and MBR and Track 0. Should I restore the MBR and Track 0 when I restore the 'C' drive?

Thank you, Peter

Normally, if restoring C only for non-boot isssues, all you need to do is to restore C without the others.
If having boot or other issues, then restoring them all is prudent.

Thank you GroverH

Always back up everything (full disk mode backups). Often you won't need to restore everything, but you need to know that you could do so when needed.

Thank you Tuttle for taking the time to help we less knowledgeable than yourself.

You're welcome. I don't like to see folks lose their precious files, so I'm happy to encourage proper backups.