Ok to format SYSTEM partition if not booting from original drive anymore?

[JefS]

I bought a SSD for my HP Pavilion dv7 and installed it as the primary boot drive, upgrading with a new copy of Windows at the same time. I use the original drive in the second slot for data, and have formatted the original C: partition, but not touched the other 3 partitions. I would like to be able to use at least one primary partition for another OS or as a backup partition. If I want to leave the recovery partition alone, and be able to run diagnostics, that means SYSTEM....Can the recovery tools work if they are not on the boot drive? If so, I can take the SYSTEM partition (the SSD has the active boot partition).

[DavidPK]

Hi,

Do you have your set of Recovery DVDs that you make when you first bought the notebook?  If you do, then there is no reason you cannot simply format the whole HDD - should you ever want to move this drive back into the bootable bay ( for example if you wanted to sell the notebook but keep your SSD ), using your Recovery Discs to reinstall Windows on the original HDD  will also re-create all the original partitions ( System, C, Recovery and HP_TOOLS ) again.

Regards,

DP-K

[JefS]

So the BIOS update and system diags don't rely on the HP_TOOLS partition?

[DavidPK · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Unless the Bios can access the HP_TOOLS partition at boot ( which it will not be able to from the drive in the second bay ), you will lose the ability to run the extended diagnostics and the ability to have the bios flash execute on reboot.  The bios will still be able to be updated, but the flash will run in the Windows environment which has more potential to cause problems.

However, the HP_TOOLS partition can be created on a flash drive or you could simply create it on your SSD - see the document on the link below regarding this - this is just as an example and the download included may not be correct for your particular notebook, so you would need to get this from your own Product page.

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/softwareDownloadIndex?softwareitem=ob-101396-1&cc=uk&dlc=en&lc=en...

Regards,

DP-K