HP Pavilion Hard Drive Partitioning

[Chassin]

I have been given four HP Pavilion 15 Notebooks to re-install by a local Retirement Home for the elderly.

Model 15-e014sb nb pc

The Recovery drives have all been removed as these notebooks originally had Windows 8 and most of the other software was out of date.

When reinstalling with a Windows 10 DVD made using the MediaCreator tool the installation program made it clear that the partitioning was not of the approved type, which did not come as a surprise because these computers have three different partitioning schemes with 6, 7, 7 & 8 partitions respectively even that the all have the identical Seagate drive.

Seagate HDD Model No: ST1000LM024HN-M101MMB

The Serial Numbers of these Notebooks are as follows:

NB#1 [edit] = with eight partitions

NB#2 [edit] =  with seven partitionsHP #1HP #2HP #3HP #4

NB#3 =[edit] with seven partitions

NB#4 = [edit] with six partitions

These partitions do not all show up in the Disk Manager but they do in the Macrium Reflect 7 drive imaging program.

What can be done to change this situation into one which the Windows 10 installation setup finds acceptable with the minimum number of partitions?

[Preferred: Boot sector | 900GB C: Drive | Remainder as a 😧 Drive partition]

Many thanks for any assitance as this partitioning system is just a little over the top...!

Ian McGregor

[WAWood]

@Chassin

Hello;

Allow me to welcome you to the HP forums!

The Recover "drive" on each PC is useless now -- as your plan is to install Win10 on all the PCs.

So my own suggestion (as others may differ) would be to use the Win10 installation option to remove all the partitions and let the installer repartition the drive as a side-effect of clean-installing Win10.

Here's a link to a tutorial from the Win10 forums about installing Win10:  https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/1950-clean-install-windows-10-a.html

Look at steps 12 and 13 for examples, and when the list of partitions is shown, just delete all of them.

Good Luck

[Chassin]

Hello,

That was a very fast response and is exactly what I wanted to know, so very many thanks.

I can reduce the partitions to four per drive which is perfect.

|--WinRE--|--EFI--|--C:\900GB--|--D:\The remainder--|

The link which you provided gives all of the details I wanted to know.

I can now lose twelve partitons in total.

Excellent! A big help.

Nice to know you as well.

My regards,

Ian McGregor

The finished article will look like this, but with a corporate desktop:

[Chassin]

One further very important question.

As these are four OEM machines they rely on the OEM activation key and although I have found four activation keys these do not work.

Where is the OEM activation key stored, is it retreivable, or will it be lost forever if all the partitions are removed and the disk becomes one big unallocated void before the Windows setup procedure re-partitions the drive?

This is of major concern before I feel comfortable enough to proceed with the re-partitioning process.

As before, many thanks for your expertise.

Ian McGregor

[WAWood]

@Chassin

In OEM Win10 PCs, the product key is encoded into the UEFI firmware of the motherboard.

When you restore using HP Recovery Media, it automatically retrieves that key to reactivate the OS.

I've been told that media created from Microsoft also does the same thing  -- but I have no way to confirm that.

This utility is supposed to be able to retrieve the product key -- which you can write down and then re-enter manually:  ShowKeyPlus - Windows 10 Forums 

Good Luck

[Chassin]

Hello again,

Windows 10 was re-installed from a DVD made with the mediacreator.exe tool and not from a USB.

For some unknown reason and although all the old partitions had been deleted the installer has decided on a 499MB NTFS (500MB) legacy BIOS (?) marked Recovery and displaying Healthy (OEM Partition)

The next 100MB partition shows Healthy (EFI-System Partition) Which I presume is FAT32

And (C:) 930.91GB NTFS Healthy (Boot, Pagefile, Crash Dump, Primary Partition)

The BIOS is the latest F.28 version downloaded from HP.

My first question being, Why didn't Windows install the 450MB Recovery, 90MB System and 16MB MSR partitions mentioned in the Tutorial?

The second point is that although I can get into WinRE by holding down the Shift key and clicking on Re-start I cannot now get in from a stopped condition by starting, immediately pressing the Esc key, and choosing F11

So my second question is, What did I do wrong, and how do I fix this issue?

Motherboard details: Hewlett-Packard 196F (U3E1) Version 95.33

Thanks for any answers to the above.

Ian McGregor