Need Explanation of All These Partitions

[xdellman]

**bleep** Management in my system (15-p066us-Win 8.1) shows 4 partitions in the gpahic panel:

650 MB Healthy (Recovery Partition)

260 MB Healthy (EFI) System Parttion)

675.18 GB NTFS Windows (C:)

22.44 GB NTFS RECOVERY (D:) Healthy (OEM Partition)

At the same time, the listing panel shows the RECOVERY (D:) partition twice. Both with the same info.

I know what the C: and 😧 partitons are (I think).

Why is the 😧 partion listed twice?

What is the difference between the 650 MB Recovery Partition and the 22.44 GB (D:) RECOVERY Partition?

What is the EFI System Partition?

I know, a lot of "newby-ism" here.

BTW, the system is working fine, I just like to know what's inside.

[xdellman]

I don't know what added all the gibberish to my post. (The "bleep" and smilies)

It was written on the mentioned machine.

Please excuse it. I hope it's not being ignored because of that.

Maybe I need to repost?

Still need the help.

[Malygris1 · Accepted solution]

Hi there @xdellman 

Welcome to the HP Support Forums! It is a great place to find the help you need, both from other users, HP experts and other support personnel.

I understand your question and confusion about the various partitions on your system. With many of the newer BIOS systems there are more than before.

There are a few resources I can offer for you to look at that can help. Despite some of the "technical jargon",  they should  be helpful to you. Start with this one:

Partitioning and Naming Drives (Windows 😎

This one is a wonderful post by @Daniel_Potyrala , even though it is referring to windows 7, is loaded with useful information that applies to windows 8 as well. Its theme is more about preparing another drive with partitions, but discounting that part, there is information about the purpose of most of the partitions you are asking about. For your question, mostly look at section B, C and E in this post from our forums.

How to repartition HDD of HP notebook with pre-installed Windows 7

The EFI partition is a component of the system BIOS, abd allows the drive to be bootable and readable by systems with a UEFI compatible BIOS. If it were to be tampered with, the drive would most likely no longer be recogneized as a bootable device.

The 22GB recovery partition is going to be the one containing an image of your factory configuration. It is ihghly recommended that you make yourself a set of Recovery disks to have another backup of your system. You can only make one set.

The smaller one is probably the one containing backups of the current BIOS installed and drivers, used in the event that you need to recover from a failed BIOS update. Normally there is a small partition called HP_Tools.

I hope this helps.

[xdellman]

Hello, Malygris 1,

WOW. Thank you so much for the information.

I have created rescue media DVD's.

I have downloaded and saved the documents to which you referred.

I will have to digest them in the coming days. Lots of good stuff there.

Thanks again. I really appreciate your response (marked now as solved).

**bleep**

[Phil_Tijeras]

I just bought a recovery USB drive from hp and re-installed Windows 10. The only things I've done is to install all of the Windows 10 updates and I installed my network printer on the Windows 10 computer.

I went to  "Disk Management"

In the Volume list, it shows

Volume                 Layout     Type     File System     Status                                Capacity       Free Space    % Free

  <blank>              Simple     Basic     <blank>           Healthy (EFI...                  260 MB  ....         [etc.]

  <blank>              Simple     Basic      <blank>          Healthy (Recovery ...     980 MB  ....        [etc.}

Recovery (D:)     Simple     Basic       <blank>          Healthy(...                          13.15 GB         1.59 GB       12%

Recovery (D:)     Simple     Basic       NFTS                Healthy(...                          13.15 GB         1.59 GB       12%

Windows (C:)      Simple     Basic       NFTS                Healthy(B...                        917.13 GB         [etc]

why is "Recovery (D:)" listed twice?  Is that a problem?

It is only shown once on the Disk 0 map right below the Volume list.

[Phil_Tijeras]

Smiley face on my post was supposed to be colonfollowed by right parenthesis   :  )