Why So Many Partitions?

Oblivion

My wife and I each took delivery of a Dell XPS-12 Ultrabook last summer. They are identical specification, came with 250GB SSD and Win 8.0 which has since been updated to 8.1

Just out of idle curiosity I had a look in Disk Management for the first time today and was amazed to find that they both have 7 partitions! Both are laid out the same ...

500Mb Healthy (EFI System Partition)
40Mb Healthy (OEM Partition)
490Mb Healthy (Recovery Partition)
OS (C ) 217.86GB NTFS Healthy (Boot, Page File, Crash Dump, Primary Partition)
350Mb Healthy (Recovery Partition)
11.3GB Healthy (Recovery Partition)
8.01GB Healthy (Primary Partition)

Now for the really weird bit ... the OS (C ) shows 48% free space as I'd expect, but ALL the other 6 partitions show 100% free space.

So Question 1 is why do I have so many partitions, 3 of which are Recovery ... is this a result of updating to Win 8.1?

Question 2 is why do 6 of the partitions report 100% free space as if they are empty?

grumpycrab

I haven't a clue (ask @dell?) but must make doing an image backup a bit of a pain (which partitions to backup? guess do the whole lot). And I guess this is a dynamic disk too?

Uxb

Educated guess here- knowing a little....but not enough to give a comprehensive answer

Some will be Dell diagnostic partitions (My old dell from the 2000's had a recovery, diagnotics, and main drive partition).
I recall that the new GDI disk partition format used on win 8 machines replacing the old MBR format requires more reserved partitions - presumably to hold the backup copy of the disk structure (I think it is two)
This is the main advantage of the new system automatic backup against corruption - and that it can deal with disks greater than 2TB - which the MBR system cannot.

All the special system partitions will be inaccessible in windows etc so Win explorer etc will indeed probably report them as zero space.

System

The reason that you have partitions showing 100% free is because they are in a format that Windows doesn't understand. I.E. they are not FAT/FAT32 or NTFS.

They are possibly formats such as ext3

Oblivion

Thanks for the replies guys, it's starting to make some sense now. If these are indeed in a non-windows friendly format, is there any easy way of checking if they contain data ... something from the Command prompt perhaps?

kwikbreaks

A linux boot CD. From memory I think you can download something that will set up a usb stick to boot into gparted - certainly I've got one but can't remember how I made it or even why.

prost

If your main partition is half full already then it looks like you'll run out of space long before the end of the laptop's life. Is this right? If you need another drive then you'll have to partition it (and partition it to NTFS). What would you like to do?

debitcardmayhem

kwikbreaks wrote: »

A linux boot CD. From memory I think you can download something that will set up a usb stick to boot into gparted - certainly I've got one but can't remember how I made it or even why.

http://gparted.org/livecd.php but it needs a bit of linux command prompt knowledge to see if there any other files on the partitions. To be honest if the partitions are showing as 100% free then they are(within the limits of its confines eg 1024 bytes on a 200GB disk will show as 100% free). Windows doesn't know about other filesystems and therefore it cannot say it is 100% free unless it is Fat/NTFS/ISO

Jivesinger

Oblivion wrote: »

So Question 1 is why do I have so many partitions, 3 of which are Recovery ... is this a result of updating to Win 8.1?

Yes I think it is.

When the PC was new, you'd probably have had one small Recovery partition and one big one (the big one holding a copy of the disk when the PC was new, including Windows (8.0) and probably a few other things that come with a new PC).

When you upgraded to Win 8.1, it would have created the third Recovery partition; probably the 490 MB one.

Jivesinger

Oblivion wrote: »

Thanks for the replies guys, it's starting to make some sense now. If these are indeed in a non-windows friendly format, is there any easy way of checking if they contain data ... something from the Command prompt perhaps?

You could go into a command prompt within the boot options (for instance close and save all programs, then Ctrl-Alt-Delete then right click the power-button-symbol and select Restart while holding the Shift key). The drive letters could all be messed up though - drive C: may not be the one you're expecting. Use 'Exit' when you're done. Tread carefully though...

The "8.01GB Healthy (Primary Partition)" one interests me - maybe it's a Dell thing?

Oblivion

Jivesinger wrote: »

You could go into a command prompt within the boot options (for instance close and save all programs, then Ctrl-Alt-Delete then right click the power-button-symbol and select Restart while holding the Shift key). The drive letters could all be messed up though - drive C: may not be the one you're expecting. Use 'Exit' when you're done. Tread carefully though...

The "8.01GB Healthy (Primary Partition)" one interests me - maybe it's a Dell thing?

I think I'm just going to leave well alone, I'm a coward

I wondered if that 8.01GB partition might be space set aside for the SSD's Over Provisioning ... something I learnt about recently as a result of installing SSDs in two much older laptops.