do I have one restore partition too much

My build 10056 drive has one small partition to the left of the Windows partition and size is 128mb. Is there one of these partitions to the left of your Windows partition and the other to the right? If so, I would say the one on the right is left over from a previous installation and is not needed for this installation. Keep the one to the left of Windows.

 

Code:

reagentc /Info /Target C:\Windows

Type this into a elevated command prompt.

It should tell you something like this:

Code:

Windows RE location: Windows RE location: \\?\GLOBALROOT\device\harddisk0\partition3\...

If it's partition 3 it's the last and you can just go and delete the second partition (the first partition right after C)
If it's partition 2 you will likely want to move your winre.wim to Partition 3 (the last partition) in the same layou as you see in partition 2 and then register your winre.wim with

Code:

reagentc /Setreimage /Path R:\Recovery\WindowsRE /Target C:\Windows

You will need to use Diskpart to assign a letter to the partitions.

If what i described is too complicated then just live having 450mb less available, apart from having less space the extra partition doesn't do anything.

 

Just wipe the drive or remove the partition.

 

When you do a clean install, select Custom and then you can delete partitions. I suggest you delete ALL of the partitions even those little ones. Then your install will truly be a clean install and it will use all of the useable space on the disk. Setup will create one or maybe more little partitions. That is normal and they don't use a lot of room.

 

I suggest launching a command prompt window during setup and type diskpart
type list disk and you'll recognize yours by the size, most cases you'll see disk 0
type select disk #(your disk number, 0 most cases)
type clean
type exit and exit again,
your drive's completely clean without any partitions or bootsectors

 

The layout looks incorrect anyway. The system partition should be 1st on a standard install. You could delete partition 2, extend partition 1 & make the new partition 2 active using diskpart.
BCDboot to create system files to make it bootable.

It's stuffing around. Just leave it till next time your installing an OS & wipe the sucker.
powercfg -h off will turn off hibernation & save you more than 450mg if you want...

 

I usually installed Win8 with a custom layout: 32Mb FAT(16) EFI boot (you don't need anymore than that) + ~128Gb (the remaining space of the SSD) Data for C: ; ZERO reserve(s), ZERO recovery(s).
Since Win10 has regular build updates and WU upgrade is not compatible with my preferred layout (the installation either fails or it creates the missing partitions by shrinking and moving partitions on it's own without notice -> Horror!), I let the Win10 installer create a default layout for now.
Now, with 10049 (after WU upgrade from 10041 which was a clean default install), I have the same redundant (and oversized) Recovery partition. -> So, the WU upgrade did shrink and move my partitions despite it was a default layout to start with. No wonder why the upgrade took so long.

 

Boot into winpe, create your preferred partition layout, use dism to extract your edition, bcdboot & your done.

 

I never had problems with clean installs regardless of my original layout (custom/manual or default/auto). It's only the upgrades (every major version, some subversion and some build upgrades) which have a relatively high potential to mess something up. And as it seems, starting from a custom state only increases the probability of the problems.

-- Or do you mean I should get around the automatic upgrades by doing it manually with DISM? I never tried that. But upgrades are pretty much forced on Win10 TP.

On a broader scale, I would prefer if Microsoft allowed Windows 10 TP to boot from ReFS and also allowed ReFS to handle the whole LBA space (starting from sector zero with MBR padding for BIOS mode boot managers) like BtrFS on Linux. I would gladly give up on the EFI boot mode for the release from these barber partitioning rules and have my per device storage spaces handled as a whole.

 

I would never use beta's & previews as my main OS. I've got an old PC that I use for testing so it's pretty much a clean install every time for me.
That being the case each install is done through a batch from winpe. This method has never failed me.

You could have 1 primary partition for the whole drive in MBR mode. If you boot your install ISO, on the 1st screen press SHIFT+F10 to get a command prompt.
run diskpart, sel dis 0, cle, cre par pri, active, for fs=ntfs label=os quick, exit, exit
Now just continue with install, selecting the partition you created to install too...(this worked with win7, don't see why it wouldn't in win10)...

 

People here loves unnecessarily complicated things.

If you want the space back, just remove those two partitions and then enlarge the main one.

You don't even need a partitioning sw, given they are at the end of the disk.

BTW do this only to recover the space. There isn't any other problem doing a clean install with your actual layout, just some space wasted.

P.S likely you can't delete those partitions from the GUI, in that case use the command diskpart to get rid of the unwanted partitions

 

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Don't be worried. You're just wrong.

AHCI has nothing to do with bootloader.

And no partitions are not write protected, they have just a custom ID which is not known by the graphical disk manager. Hence my suggestion to use diskpart (or a third party partitioning sw)

 

Every PC maker makes its own variation.

Say, Lenovo uses two small partitions at the beginning, and a big one at the end of the disk, while the main OS (C partition will be the third one.

Once you decide to do a fresh "vanilla" installation you must forget the restore partitions, even if they are still there the boot settings to trigger them will be overwritten.

So if you care about them, you can do a couple of things

#1 Use the tools bundled by the PC maker to create a restore media (DVD/USB/Whatever).

#2 If the #1 option is not available, do an image of your HDD/SSD with a disk imaging SW (say Acronis True Image, Norton Ghost, or similar SW)

Then install your new Vanilla OS, no matter if you keep your actual disk layout or you delete all the partitions before doing it, your freshly installed OS will work the same, recovery options included (the MS recovery options, not the Lenovo/Dell/HP ones...)

#3 If something goes wrong playing with the disk layout, just start from a vanilla USB install media and restore the boot environment (usually the automated options are more than enough, but you can also use the recovery command prompt and the bootsect command)