@ T-S I own a home made rig, never had winre with W7, W8 it came with updating W8.1 to W10, I used the windows built in recovery tool (locate in control panel, recovery, file history, sytem recovery image when I had to re-image by booting on windows install dvd, option repair etc. thank you for your help !
Yes, I used to do that (use a single MBR partition) before I got my first UEFI motherboard. When the EFI compatible MBs and OSs arrived, I started to use the 32Mb EFI + rest of the space layout. There were times when I had both Linux and Windows installations (each of them had it's dedicated system drive), so the EFI boot manager (a boot manager in the MB firmware) was a big relief (no more tricky chain-boot). Nowadays I only keep a Linux in a VM under Windows, but the EFI boot is still faster than the BIOS way, thus I kept using it. I think Windows creates all these reserved,restore(,secondary-restore) partitions on MBR disks as well with the only exception being the EFI partition. So, yes I could go back to using MBR but I doubt it would stop Windows installers from spamming the drive with redundant partitions during updates/upgrades.
I'm not too skilled with the UEFI things, but if you let the installer decide the partition layout it makes a small partition on the beginning of the disk. This is intended to load the necessary things to read the main partition if it's encrypted.
This is getting a little complicated to speak about in simple sentences, so this is how I know/remember the default layout (created by NT>=6 installers on RAW disks) EFI: EFI boot (FAT) Reserved (?RAW?) System (NTFS) Recovery (NTFS) MBR: Reserved (?RAW?) System (NTFS) Recovery (NTFS) By the way, I just found this Technet article: ### Sorry, I can't post links ### It seems like the new layout we have after Win10 build upgrades (with no less than 5 partitions in total, including the redundant recovery) could be intentional. I guess this is how the Win10 RTM installer will handle things from the begging (clean install on RAW disks or during an upgrade from earlier versions of Windows).
Ok. How will that 2-parts MBR and a 1-part MBR disk look like after a Windows 10 build upgrade? I guess the 2-parts might remain as is but the 1-parts will be "upgraded" (much like humans by Cyberman in Dr. Who) may be directly on the shortcut to >=3 parts (but at least to 2 parts). I have been using EFI ever since it became available and this partition jugglery started around the same time (I am not sure if Vista or 7 was the first?), so I guess I never upgraded a Windows installation residing on an MBR layout which might mess around with the partition layout (like these post-XP Windows versions).
I believe that in case of upgrade the partitioning scheme wouldn't be touched at all, as always happened in the past. Those schemes should be meaningful only for new installations over a blank disk
If you read at least the title of this topic, you should be aware that partition layouts are in fact touched in certain cases. I can believe if somebody claims that MBR layouts are never touched by Windows Upgrades (including Win10) but GPT layouts are often messed with (see this topic + my personal experience from the past with pre-Win10 Upgrades).
You realized that you are the only one that mentioned UEFI in this thred? You are talking about problems. Those happens everywhere if you are unlucky. I'm talking about the intended behavior. Then is pretty obvious that the installation over MBR disk is almost bulletproof after 30 years or so of refinements of both OS and BIOS, while UEFI and GPT partitons are still very young not to mention win 10 which is still in diapers, so bad things can happen more frequently.
The new 450MB Partition at the end of the start partition is normal. It is part of the new layout. This partition is reserved for Windows RE. An additional partition for a recovery image is no longer supported. A device with preinstalled Win10 comes only with this partitions: ESP, $MSR, Start (Win10), WinRE, [Data] The upgrade process starts to introduce this layout. If you do a clean setup you still remain with the old layout.