My Dell laptop (recently did a clean install to Windows has a Recovery partition in addition to an OEM partition and the OS partition. The OS partition is "Primary Partition, Boot, Page File, and Crash Dump". The Recovery Partition is "Primary Partition, Active, and System".

Shouldn't the OS partition also be listed as active?

Can I safely delete the Recovery partition?

Nope, it should be when you are done with the whole thing. However I think you can only have 1 Active partition per physical hdd or your system won't know which to boot from.


NO! As that partition is the Active one and the 'System' bit tells us where your computer is booting from, remove it and your PC won't boot properly. The 'Boot' bit on the OS partition tells you where the OS resides not where it actually boots from, just a funny little windows-ism.

The safest way to do it is to move the boot files over to the OS partition (repair if required) and set the OS partition to active, but before all that make sure you have bootable CD/USB so if anything screws up you can restore your system to a workable state or reset the partition settings.

This may help: http://windowssecrets.com/forums/showthread.php/138153-A-3-Hour-Tour. Although I know your problem is creating a drive image with the Dell recovery partition, so the full backup image bit may not be possible.

I think mkk highlighted in the other thread about using Acronis which I have found more reliable then windows backup over the years. Good luck and remember before you try anything... backup, backup and backup!

There can only be one active partition per disk. The "active" flag tells the system where the bootloader resides, so it looks like your boot configuration is stored on the recovery partition. Setting the OS partition as active or deleting the recovery partition outright would cause your computer to be unbootable.

If you really wanted to delete that recovery partition, you'd have to make sure there was nothing on there you wanted. Then you'd need to edit the boot configuration. You could use a tool like EasyBCD to create a new bootloader on the OS partition, then set that partition as active. Another option is the built-in command-line editor, bcdedit. Messing up could make the computer unbootable, though.

I'm thinking I should just leave things as they are. I can create a system image on an external harddrive, even though I can't via the network.

However, if I do decide to tackle this - how do I move the bootloader to the OS partition?

Anybody?

m1st, mentioned using EasyBCD which would do the trick. If you find you can't boot you could always run a repair, if that fails however you can restore to factory defaults from your recovery CD that you made earlier.

If you backed everything up and you're going to do a full clean install of Windows 8 and you do not want to go back to Windows 7, completely format the drive and delete all partitions.

The Windows 8 setup will create all necessary partitions and mark the appropriate ones as active to ensure proper booting.

I'm looking for a way to delete the recovery partition without doing a clean install. Is there a tutorial for Easy BCD that will help me move whatever needs to be moved from the Recovery partition to the OS partition?

If you already have Windows 8 installed, you can delete the partition through the diskmgmt.msc tool. Beware to not delete a partition listed as active, and make damn sure you don't delete your operating system in the process. I'm not sure this will allow you to stretch your OS partition to use that now freed space, that may require the use of a basic partitioning software, GParted is a great LiveCD partition manager. As with anything else, be extremely careful that you don't delete the wrong one.

http://neosmart.net/wiki/display/EBCD/C ... +Partition

Again, you have to be careful when messing with the bootloader, else the computer may not boot.