• Do I need the reserved ‘H’ partition?

    Home » Forums » AskWoody support » PC hardware » Questions – Maintenance and backups » Do I need the reserved ‘H’ partition?

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    lysdexic
    AskWoody Plus
    March 14, 2013 at 4:15 pm #488303

    Win8 64bit, Acronis True Image 2013. 1 x 250GB SSD and 1 x Seagate 2TB.

    Due to stuff up by me (I restored the UEFI/BIOS to optimized defaults which affected the SSD 250GB I use as my ‘C’ drive). My techie, not understanding that, installed a new SSD and installed Win 8 on it. I now have a ‘C’ drive partitioned into ‘C’ and ‘H’ Reserved Partition. My question is: can I incorporate the information from ‘H’ into ‘C’ (I hate partitions) or am I stuck with it. When I image to an external HDD with True Image 2013 it advises strongly to image the ‘H’ partition as well, which I do, but when I restored only the ‘C’ image my machine worked perfectly, I can’t understand this, if True Image suggests backing up the ‘H’ partition why will an image restore work perfectly without restoring the ‘H’ partition?

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    • WSruirib
      AskWoody Lounger
      March 14, 2013 at 4:48 pm #1380680

      You can’t delete it without making your system unbootable.

      Here is info on how you can delete it and recover from the unbootable state.

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    • WSLook
      AskWoody Lounger
      March 15, 2013 at 6:16 am #1380786

      Hello pledden,
      This tutorial will also help you.

      Reply | Quote
    • lysdexic
      AskWoody Plus
      March 15, 2013 at 9:07 am #1380833

      Thank you Look but that tutorial is for Win 7.

      Reply | Quote
    • WSCLiNT
      AskWoody Lounger
      March 15, 2013 at 10:03 am #1380859

      You shouldn’t have too much issue removing the partition. I would take a closer
      look at what is on that partition first. If there are boot files resident, there are ways to safely move them, or repair
      once the partition has been removed.
      The issue I’m concerned with is if your system is fully UEFI, which I don’t see reflected in your partition setup.
      One usually has 3 system partitions, including the main windows OS one in a UEFI setup.

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    • lysdexic
      AskWoody Plus
      March 15, 2013 at 5:10 pm #1380988

      Thank you CLiNT, In my file manager drive ‘H’ contents are invisible. In Disk Management the partition is 349MB with 242MB used but I cannot ascertain the contents.

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    • WSCLiNT
      AskWoody Lounger
      March 15, 2013 at 8:19 pm #1381014

      You’ll likely need a third party partitioning tool to examine the contents.
      You can also run “BCDEDIT” in an elevated command prompt.
      Take note of where the boot manager & boot loader files are located.

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    • Clive Pugh
      Member
      March 20, 2013 at 3:03 pm #1381919

      Quite honestly the size of H is not large enough to bother with. Due to the many problems that can occur when messing around with the rserved partition it is not worth doing IMHO.

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    • lysdexic
      AskWoody Plus
      March 20, 2013 at 7:31 pm #1381964

      Thank you for your input Clive. I agree with your premise but it unnecessarily complicates an image restore to a new or formatted drive, with one partition it is straight forward. I am not sufficiently knowledgeable to to risk incorporating the reserved partition back into the ‘C’ partition but that is my fervent desire. Perhaps when my machine needs a format and reload I shall get a techie to load Windows as one partition, until then I shall continue with the present setup as it is running perfectly (Let sleeping dogs lie)

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    • Clive Pugh
      Member
      March 21, 2013 at 7:34 am #1382064

      You could use a third party image maker such as easeus-to-do (free) macrium reflect (free and paid) I use easeus as it a one click backup and restore option which will save & restore the reserved partition as well as the ‘C’ partition without having to do anything but put in the recovery disk for easeus and select which image to restore and click go.

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    • Clive Pugh
      Member
      March 21, 2013 at 7:39 am #1382075

      Win8 64bit, Acronis True Image 2013. 1 x 250GB SSD and 1 x Seagate 2TB.

      Due to stuff up by me (I restored the UEFI/BIOS to optimized defaults which affected the SSD 250GB I use as my ‘C’ drive). My techie, not understanding that, installed a new SSD and installed Win 8 on it. I now have a ‘C’ drive partitioned into ‘C’ and ‘H’ Reserved Partition. My question is: can I incorporate the information from ‘H’ into ‘C’ (I hate partitions) or am I stuck with it. When I image to an external HDD with True Image 2013 it advises strongly to image the ‘H’ partition as well, which I do, but when I restored only the ‘C’ image my machine worked perfectly, I can’t understand this, if True Image suggests backing up the ‘H’ partition why will an image restore work perfectly without restoring the ‘H’ partition?

      Have you checked that the H partition did or did not get restored in disk management? (it may not have allocated it a drive letter as not needed). As Acronis advised you to backup the reserved partition and you did, it may have automatically restored the reserved partition for you. Or it restored the ‘C’ partition but did not format the existing reserved partition.

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    • lysdexic
      AskWoody Plus
      March 21, 2013 at 8:40 am #1382100

      When I restored recently with True Image I only restored the ‘C’ partition ( I unchecked the ‘H’ partition)and it all worked perfectly but that was not to a new or formatted disc. When restoring to a new or formatted disc my advice has been to restore the reserved partition first and then the ‘C’ partition. I wonder why True Image always advises to image the ‘H’ partition when it is not a needed restore, maybe when you have one copy of the reserved partition that is sufficient for any future restore?

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