Hello I have a notebook with windows 8 OEM. In the past I have experimented with dual-booting other OSs, then deleting them and now I have a few extra partitions in my drive. I was wondering if this community could tell me what partitions are safe to merge to my "working" volume (C: or E: ). I have some screenshots of Disk Management and DiskInternals Linux Reader windows. I think there's a better way of showing You the contents of my volumes, but I don't know what program to use, hope You can recommend me one. I also have a few questions: Is my windows 8 OEM inside my hard drive? For example, if I format my whole hard disk completely, would I lose the OEM? Can I replace my windows 8 OEM with windows 8.1 OEM or even with custom windows 8.1 OEM (for example: fully updated one, if it's possible)? Hope You can help me with this.
I think you can make something like a multi-volume drive with different formatted partitions, but you're probably more interested in extending the original partition. I would move everything on the partition after your windows partition to the windows partition. Then delete the subsequent partition and extend the original partition. You can do this stuff in diskpart, but I'm not sure exactly how to do it in diskmgmt.msc In diskpart it's relatively easy. You just select the correct disk, select the correct partition for each operation, then either delete or extend. Example: Code: list disk select disk 0 select partition 3 delete select partition 2 extend
Try doing list volume and list partition commands in diskpart to give yourself a better idea of what you're deleting You can also delete them by doing: Code: list volume select volume e delete select volume c extend at least I think you can...
Before I delete a volume, I need to make sure it's not crucial. The problem is that I don't know if a volume is needed for normal computer usage. Here's a screenshot of diskpart with command "list volume" The only thing I see is that volumes C: and E: are needed and also Volume 5 is needed, because it has my EFI boot files (I am not sure of that). I need You to confirm if my statements are correct and help me identify if other volumes are necessary.
The fat32 one is the Windows System Partition. It's usually 100mb, but yours seems to be sized for advanced format 4kn drives, which recommend using 260 megs. Beyond that, it's hard to say which ones are what. Windows RE is usually the partition that copies the winre.wim file to, but it's usually not labeled. Also they usually have the recovery id flags set. I really don't know your drives like you do. You could try assigning drive letters to the hidden partitions in diskpart and browsing through them to see whats in them. Usually hidden partitions house either boot info, recovery files such as winre.wim or install.wim, or any combination of the two. Your recovery partition seems quite large... 27gb is fairly excessive. Most install.wim recovery files are only 2-5gb. You could probably cut/paste that thing around and messing with partition extend/shrinks to recover a lot of that space. Just remember to re-do your reagentc osdevice settings