I had to set my HP Envy Laptop back to its factory settings. Having upgraded the original Win 8.1 the pre installed to Win 10, this process brought back Win 8.1. The machine, works fine now. But looking at the Disk Management (snapshot attached) I found one drive is duplicated "D" and there are two recovery partitions. I don't understand this and I do not know if something should be done to fix this either. I will appreciate any help, and thanks in advance.
The drive with the partition label 'RECOVERY (D)' seems to be the OEM partition(the Windows 8.1) not particularly the Windows installed by yourself. However, if you are not going to revert back to whatever Windows 8.1 that comes with your system by default you can delete that partition and remember you aren't going to be able to revert to it after that. The first one is the recovery drive for Windows 10 upgraded to - possibly by yourself. Perhaps, it is not OEM Windows 8.1 that comes with your HP Envy while looking at the information displayed on the Device Manager.
Thanks Hadron-Curious. The original OS was Windows 8.1, and as per HP offer I upgraded to Windows 10. I would appreciate if you help me with the following: First partition with no letter is Windows 10 recovery, is it possible to delete it as I'm not planning to go back to Windows 10? If I'm not mistaken the second Partiton with no letter is Windows 8.1 boot. Table on top shows two "D" partition with same size, but at Disk 0 it shows only one of them? I'm attaching a better capture, and I hope you will bear with me till I understand
You still have 900gb on C so a couple small 20gb partitions shouldn't affect the operation.(So leave it the way it is and do not worry about it) Or.... Carefully look at each partition to see which partition has your windows 8.1 and use disk management to delete the other partition and make it part of C. Another thing you can do, is to back up all your data and use your HP recovery disk to reinstall 8.1 and in the process that should delete any other partitions, Using the recovery disk should re-create a new recovery partition
As per your questions : 1. The space taken by that Windows 10 recovery is very minimal and if you intended in deleting it you can do that without it having no effect on your default OS Windows 8.1. Before you proceed with the removal of that partition I would advise you to use the cleanmgr to clear all previously created directories by the Windows 10 upgrade including 'Windows old'. 2. That is very correct. It is the 'System Reserved Partition' and if you look very well it is addressed as 'EFI System Partition' - that is crucial to performing good booting up of your Windows 8.1 and other related system functions. You aren't going to touch that one unless you don't want your system to boot normally or perfectly well. 3. It seems like a duplicate of your Windows 8.1 RECOVERY (D) partition. Perhaps, the person who did the setup carried out the process more than once for many reasons. It could be the first attempt failed due to corrupt Windows image file used or it could be other factors all together. The one that looks suspicious among the two of them spotted to be fake is the one without a file system. If I were you I would use third party disk management to look into the detail of both partitions and delete the one that is a duplicate without much usefulness. There are free software out there you can use to do that. I usually would recommend 'AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard' and it is also free. Thank you for the attachment and that helps to get things into better perspective. I am with you all the way. Thank you once again.
Joe C, I agree with you I still have plenty of disk space left, and I have already used HP recovery to to reinstall Windows 8.1, after a bad driver from HP screwed up Windows 10. As for your kind answer hadron-Curious, your right about two attempts of recovery that is what happened, I apologize for not mentioning in the first post, I will go for using AOMEI and try to get red of the excess drive and will post the results. I very much appreciate your help guys, I never realy excpect that much support.
You could also use disk management within windows to delete the 20gb extra partition and then use disk management to extend the C partition by 20gb of the previous deleted partition
Joe using Windows Disk Management I can not delete either of the 20GB partitions, when you highlight them the delete option does not show. Also I know that partition D is the original HP recovery. What is more confusing is that it show as a single Partition in Disk 0 section. This is the capture from AOMEI. Now there are three partitions without letter names not two, it shows one FAT32 partition which I do not know why it is there or where it came from. I attached a capture of the third partition defined as “other” as it looked really unusual, at least for me, its properties shows that it is empty unlike the rest they all have some used space on them. Checking with Windows Disk Manager it is only possible to delete partition No.2 with 260MB, and partition “C:” I used cleanmgr deleted everything and only left the drivers package, I was worried that I may need it later on. To be honest I am now confused I do not know my next step.
I would suggest you leave the RECOVERY D partition alone as it is reported to be one from AOMEI. You should also leave the WinRe which is your system recovery environment and it cannot be displayed right at the Device Manager and the EFI system partition. As for the 'Other' that is empty and the recovery for Windows 10 that is no longer useful to you can be deleted . That is delete the Windows 10 recovery that appears in Device Manager as number one partition at Device manager and delete the empty FAT32 partition at AOMEI. While looking at the whole situation it is clear the partitions you can be able to delete are of minimal storage sizes.
Please corrct me if I'm wrong, what can be deleted is the first partition and the empty one, though you do not see the need to do this. That is OK with me, as you surely found out that I do not have much knowledge about hadr disks, and fear that this may cause problems later on, which I'm not qualified enough to deal with, that why I wanted to make sure that everything is back to normal so I be more comfortable. Thank again Hadron-Curious and I do appreciate you time.
Hi Hadron-Curious After deleting the "other" partition, I had some reading in the internet about hard disks just to try to understand better. For an experienced guy like yourself it is a minor issue as your last post indicates. I found many places mention EaseUS as a powerful software to deal with such matters and thought I give it a try, I downloaded the free version and here is what it shows. Then tried many times to add the unallocated space to the C partition with no success, every time the operation aportes while in restart. Could you help me with a reason please?
I would suggest for you not to have pieces of partition everywhere you should try and see if you can use the free EaseUS to merge the three unallocated partitions. If possible merge the already merged partition(the three unallocated partitions merged into one) with C partition - usually it takes lot of time when merging other partition to your system files data partition. If the merging fails with the third party software you can use the Device Manager to try to do that. It is as follows: 1. Right click on the unallocated partition and select 'Merge Partition' from the context menu. 2. In the next stage select the local drive C as the partition you want to merge the unallocated partition with and click on 'OK' for process to continue. 3. Wait for the process to finish and check if there are changes.
The main issue I'm having now is there is almost nothing I could do with this unallocated space. AOMEI and EaseUs could not deal with it neither by merging it to Windows partition nor by resizing Windows partition to include it. Disk Manager also does not give any option with the right click except creating new simple volum.
I think as long as your working within windows, Windows is not going to let you do anything to the partitions that it thinks it is using
I have been using AOMEI Partition Assistant Pro to do this for over a year now and it always work for me. Perhaps, you would have to combined the three unallocated partitions first before merging to drive C. I would like to see image of the error AOMEI is giving when you are trying to merge unallocated partition with drive C. Thank you.
I don’t receive any error messages from AOMEI after clicking on apply, the computer restarts, the operation starts for a split second and a line in this dark screen says the “operation aborted”, that is it. I saw in HP support site that they lock the HDD in their laptops to protect the recovery partition and another partition they call "HP Tools" used for diagnosing hardware, that last one should have been hidden as I never saw before, could this be the reason? this partition is protected.
Possibly that should be the cause of you not being able to merge those partitions. The only option left now is to do clean install if you still have your Windows 8.1 OEM installation image or disc with the product key. Perhaps, you can download the ISO for that Windows 8.1 only .