The hard drive on my Acer laptop (Aspire V5-552) has 5 hidden partitions? One I could accept, assuming it contains an image of the original set up. But what are the other 4? I list them below with what details I have discovered using Macrium Reflect;
Recovery – NTFS Primary 255.9 of 400 MB used.
Esp – FAT32 (LBA) Primary 48.6 of 300 MB used
Unnamed, unformatted primary 128 MB
C: - NTFS Primary … main part of HD 496 GB
Unnamed NTFS Primary 337.5 of 350MB used
Push Button Reset – NTFS Primary 12.56 of 15 GB used
OS is Win 8.1 and I'd really like to tidy things up ... it won't give me a lot more space, but it looks a mess and I thought you could only have 4 partitions total?
Windows will create a couple, System Reserved and an EFI partition if your BIOS is UEFI. MBR is limited to 4 partitions but GPT isn't. What. If you haven't created your recovery media do it now while you can. If you delete any of those factory partitions it will likely break your factory recovery function.
One option is to do a clean install and get rid of all the factory hidden partitions. You can download Windows 8.1 here, Create installation media for Windows 8.1 - Windows Help. It will use the factory embedded product code automatically. Assuming you install the correct version that matches your factory install.
Some OEM's put more of those hidden partitions than others. My ASUS laptop just had the one hidden OEM partition with the recovery image on it. Four partitions total. Now it just has three, I did a clean install of 8.1. All my Personal Files are on a separate DATA drive. It has dual drive bays so I installed two SSD's.
Sadly, my Acer has only one drive bay; that's the trouble with laptops and notebooks - not easily upgradeable. Getting rid of those annoying partitions is just about all I can do.
Thanks again alphanumeric.
Yeah, My K75DE is big so it has room for a second bay. Like you say most only have the one drive bay so about all you can do is put in a bigger drive. I ditched my factory OEM install long ago. I took the factory drive out and put two SSD's in and did a clean install. No looking back for me.
