What To Do With Partitions

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Got an HP desktop that came out of the factory running Win7. The owners did the Win10 upgrade, and then they got a severe malware attack. After getting rid of that, Windows wouldn’t work, and neither would a Repair Install. So last night I did a full install. The “pre-install” partitioning was a small System partition, an OS partition, and an HP Recovery partition. The Windows10 install wouldn’t go forward because the System partition had no free space, so I formatted it to remove its contents and then did the Win10 install in the OS partition. Now there is the empty old System partition, the OS partition, an unnamed partition showing as Recovery Partition in Disk Management, and the original HP Recovery partition.

Is there any reason I can’t (or shouldn’t) remove the old System partition and the HP Recovery one, and add the space to the OS partition? And is the Win10 Disk Management program OK to do this with?

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Is the system partition still empty?

Disk management should indicate if it is still active or contains boot information.

Personally I would have deleted all partitions during the install stage and install Windows to the now unallocated space which presumably would have been the full disk.

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Is the system partition still empty?

Disk management should indicate if it is still active or contains boot information.

Personally I would have deleted all partitions during the install stage and install Windows to the now unallocated space which presumably would have been the full disk.

Yes, the system partition is 100% free. Disk Management says it is System, Active, Primary Partition. The OS partition is showing as Boot, Page File, Crash Dump, Primary Partition. Even though I put a copy of the User folders on a thumb drive before the install, I still wanted to hang onto the original folders, which is why I didn’t delete all the partitions.

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There have been several similar questions and the answers always revolve around the question of whether or not your are absolutely certain that the partition has no further use. Personally, unless you are in dire need of the space for something else, I would leave it alone. A little disk space is cheap insurance.

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On the Windows 7 computer that I bought earlier this year, I decided to keep the system partitions, with all of their contents, because it is getting impossible to get Windows 7 these days, and I may need to do a factory refresh.

I also made the system restore DVDs plus a backup of the hard drive. And I did a restore to a bigger hard drive, and then put the original small drive into a static bag. So I could likely get by fine if I wiped the system partitions. But just to have plenty of options for restoring Windows 7, I decided to keep the system partitions.

If not for the difficulty in obtaining a copy of Windows 7, I would have eliminated the system partitions in order to have a cleaner hard drive.

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server

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7 is my favorite, and it’s officially supported till 2020.

I’ve started venturing into the world of Ubuntu Linux, so I’m planning on that becoming my favorite within the next several months.

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server

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I know nothing about Linux.

You can download Linux for free, and install it on a spare computer if you have one. It will probably come packaged with some decent, free software, such as Libre Office, Firefox, Thunderbird, etc. Start playing with it and learning it. There may come a time when you will want to switch from Windows to Linux.

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server

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