Dell Recovery Partition Windows 10
Violette Ransone
I have a question regarding the partitions on my Inspiron 17. I had done a reset using the Dell Recovery when my dad gave me his laptop he bought 2 years ago. I wanted to wipe it clean. After it was done, I checked the windows version and it was 1607. I decided to use the Windows Media Creation tool to reinstall Windows with the newest version instead of downloading all the updates. When I got to the step where it asks "Where do you want to install Windows", I had multiple Recovery partitions
I wanted to reinstall Win 10. I first updated the bios (though this is not the cause). I first tried the win 10 refresh / reset options as well as the advanced option, but kept getting can not find recovery partition. I ended up trying via reboot and F12 and the the UEFI options and ended up in some endless loop that resulted in a hardware check without errors.
As i bought the system with a usb win image (read only usb) i ended up using that to reinstall. It's quite cumbersome as the windows update then takes 6 hour and i needed two as the usb was build 1806 (i think) and needed to go to 1909 to go to 20H2. during that process i get a lot of failures and errors with failed drivers installs.
Sorry for the confusion, i thought at 19 h to quickly launch the reinstal, and ended up being busy till 1 AM to simply start windows update after finally gaving the wifi working and fixing all the errors, it ran till 7 am.
If you make a Windows "Recovery Drive" (on a 16GB thumb drive), the only thing you really need is the EFI or System Reserved partition up front and the OS partition. The USB drive replaces the the Windows Recovery Partition .
As time goes on, there is a decreasing value to your PCs original Factory Recovery Image (in your case also labeled as the 15GB Image which should not be empty, but appears to be. Based on the number of partitions this may not have been a new PC and maybe the contents were deleted?). There are generally to many updates and other things to put back after restoring the OS. Use a 2TB or larger USB HDD to regularly to keep a current backup of your OS. You can use MS WindowsBackupImage (Backup and Restore-Windows 7 or another similar tool). You can then restore it with the Recovery Drive (or other proprietary tool).
HINT: Move older WindowsBackupImages to a different folder to archive them or the tool will overwrite your older one. I store them as [PC-Name]\[date]\[Image folder] and generally create a text file at the date level to help me remember. WindowsBackupImage works, but it's finicky.
Backup your data separately using a data backup tool (I use 2BrightSparks SyncBackFree). It's a file level tool as opposed to one that makes those large unreadable archive files (like the Windows Backup tool, Seagate and WD ones).
I also suggest you partition the physical drive into Apps and Data partitions. I move all my data to Users\[uname]\ folders on D:\ (Same structure as on C:). That way the C:\ is just an OS and D:\ is just Data. Your OS image (and backups) will not contain old data, be smaller and easier to manage (50-70 GB typically, not hundreds of GB). If you do this, it's unlikely you will need more than 150GB for the OS partition. There is a proper way to move the user folders in Windows, but there are many tutorials like this:
-systems/windows-10/how-to-change-the-location-of-user-folders-in-windows-10/
In my case, Windows only recognized the EFI System Partition, OS and The WINRETOOLS as valid when I made the WindowsImageBackup (IE that's all I need to boot and I really don't need the WINRETOOLS). Including other partitions is optional (but not where we are going). As for the excess partitions, you can use the Windows PE and DiskPart to clean up things, but it's easier to use one of the free tools like EaseUs Partition Master (which I know works).
HINT: If you make a backup of all of the partitions, you can delete what ever you want and then if there is an issue learn how to restore the Image to your drive. Ultimately you want to be able to do this. Backup is no good if you can not use it.
Regarding the (old) install media you used, you can go to Microsoft at any time to download the latest version of Windows 10 and make a new USB drive to install with. Easily and freely available for Win 10; your HW is registered with MS so you don't generally need to worry about keys to reinstall. No reason to use your old install media and then upgrade. -us/software-download/windows10 You have the option of installing directly, or creating either a USB drive or ISO image.
HINT: Use something like G-Parted to delete all the partitions on your drive before you reinstall and you will not have all the stuff you had to clean up.
HINT: As of V2004 and up, if you want to use the MS WindowsBackupImage tool, then you may need to use a partition manager (like EaseUS) to shrink the LEFT side of C:\ and expand the System partition if it's under 500MB (make it 900MB for the future). For some reason MS is now making this only a 50MB partition (at least under MBR) and it causes an error.
In the meanwhile i did another reinstall, but did not take a good image backup before doing specific config i would like later to not have. (ie i will allwasy have to reformat once i no longer work at this project at a customer).
I choose the later. This installs a clean (almost) up to date OS with only Dell Support assistant and Dell Update. ALL THE INSTALLED APPS FROM THE FACTORY WERE GONE AND THE RECOVERY PARTITION WAS NOW EMPTY.
I also tried the OS recovery which basically took 4 hours to run and installed the same content. Might as well just download the latest OS from MS and then install Dell Update. If your PC is more than 3 years old, you may not even need that (ie all your drivers will be included in Windows Update)
1. Windows does set up a bunch of extra partitions during setup, so many may just be a result of that. Dell also has extra support partitions, but I have never been one to use those. It does look however you have one or two partitions too many, but they are small really. If you are ok with completely wiping the drive and clearing all partitions during Windows setup, you will have as much space available to you as possible.
2. The thing that stood out to me was Volume 1, the RAW partition of 535GB. That's over half your capacity not available to you!! Check the hard drive model to see if it is indeed a 1TB drive, then expand your C: into that space (or set up as a secondary user data drive).
The new SSD is attached to the only M.2 NVME socket. The old SSD is attached to a M.2 to SATA adapter and in turn attached to another SATA to USB 3.0 adapter. I can boot from this old SSD before and after cloning and everything works just fine.
I used different disk cloning/imaging apps (True Image, Macrium Reflect, AOMEI Backupper, Paragon Backup & Recovery, Clonezilla) to clone the old SSD to the new one. I also use disk-cloning/disk-to-disk to clone the entire SSD. Preferably with sector-by-sector copy turned on.
Long story short, I tried different apps but Clonezilla is the only one that kinda works for me (used options -e2 -j2 -q1 -iefi to attempt to make an identical copy). I unplug the old SSD before restarting to prevent GUID conflict. Everything works including OS Recovery right after.
But after that, I need to extend the Windows partition (C:) on the new SSD to utilize the added space. Because the recovery partitions (recovery, Image and DELLSUPPORT) are next to the Windows partition, and the free space is at the end, I need to move these partitions to the end of the disk before extending.
After I move these partitions, OS Recovery stops working. When I select SupportAssist OS Recovery in F12 Boot Menu, a "blue screen of Dell" (because it bears the color of Dell) appears with nothing to show and PC will turn off after 30-60s. If I plug in the USB disk (old), OS Recovery will work again (boot from new SSD but judging from old SSD activity light, recovery must be using the old SSD again).
NOTE: This procedure also allows you to move recovery partitions to a different disk, free up precious space on SSD. If this is what you choose to do, clone 2 recovery partitions (named Image and DELLSUPPORT to the HDD) while keeping the remaining recovery partition in place. The rest of the procedure should be the same. Keep in mind I have not tested this scenario.
Looking at the offset you can see the recovery partition we are looking for is 495540219904 because it's next to the biggest Windows partition (biggest gap between partitions). If you have trouble figuring out which partition, calculate the offset against the rounded value you noted down in diskpart ealier (offset / 1024 = KB, offset / 1024^2 = MB, offset / 1024^3 = GB...).
Note down/copy the offset value.
WARNING: Mounting recovery reveals it's mostly free, which is suspicious. Some BCD elements points to non-existent files on this partition (for instance in Device object 'Windows Recovery', element named SdiPath value is '\Recovery\WindowsRE\boot.sdi'). It could be an image partition, in which case, editing a file with a text editor could corrupt some parts of it. To prevent this, an disk/sector editor might be needed, like Sector Edit function from BootIce. Unfortunately, Sector Edit is very basic and it doesn't allow us to find strings so using it for our purpose is tricky. A better program is Runtime's DiskExplorer for NTFS (license needed). Currently, I have no problem with notepad++. I will update this answer again if needed.
Once you mounted the recovery partition and obtained disk GUID and partition offset, edit the file W:\Recovery\Logs\Reload.xml. If this file doesn't exist, you got wrong recovery partition.
You can do this inside Windows, but you need to enter the full command into the command prompt [running as admin], for ex:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Notepad++\notepad++.exe W:\Recovery\Logs\Reload.xml
It is a bit easier if you use Hiren's Boot PE as it contains everything you need. I don't recommend to use notepad.exe, use notepad++ instead. Hiren's Boot PE will not detect your M.2 NVME SSD in RAID SATA mode, so go to BIOS and set SATA mode to AHCI temporarily as necessary.
In tag , replace the attribute "offset" and "guid" with values you obtained. It's best to convert guid to lowercase as I don't know if it's case sensitive or not. Save the file when you are done.