Recovery Partition use?

[Abhishek sharma]

I have a partition called Recovery(NTFS). It is there since I bought the laptop. I have never used it. The size of the partition is 15.91 gb. 

Recently I was thinking to install linux along with windows but dont know about this partition. I have another partition, called recovery partition. I want to know what is its use and which one is actually required. Please also tell me if I can put them on extrenal hdd and free up my laptop space. I am attaching a screenshot of disk manager for better understanding. 

[BobVonBob]

HP basically just slaps a Windows recovery disk on your drive. You're good to remove it. My only question is whether you already have Linux installed given those EXT3 partitions.

[Kon-Tiki]

I partly agree. Before you remove the recovery partition, however, I would make sure that you have another recovery medium for your laptop (USB stick for instance). The purpose of the recovery partition is to help you solve problems that occur due to a defect in your main installation (on the C partition). So while you don't need the recovery partition for day to day use I would be careful to remove it unless you have, as mentioned, another recovery medium.

[aDoomGuy]

Yes, HP machines use the recovery partitions to create install media. Unless you are absolutely skint for free space I would suggest you leave it.

[Abhishek sharma]

48 minutes ago, BobVonBob said:

HP basically just slaps a Windows recovery disk on your drive. You're good to remove it. My only question is whether you already have Linux installed given those EXT3 partitions.

I did, formated it to make my disk more organised

[Abhishek sharma]

What about the recovery drive 980 MB capacity then? What is it used for?

[Abhishek sharma]

26 minutes ago, Kon-Tiki said:

I partly agree. Before you remove the recovery partition, however, I would make sure that you have another recovery medium for your laptop (USB stick for instance). The purpose of the recovery partition is to help you solve problems that occur due to a defect in your main installation (on the C partition). So while you don't need the recovery partition for day to day use I would be careful to remove it unless you have, as mentioned, another recovery medium.

 

50 minutes ago, BobVonBob said:

HP basically just slaps a Windows recovery disk on your drive. You're good to remove it. My only question is whether you already have Linux installed given those EXT3 partitions.

What about the recovery drive 980 MB capacity then? What is it used for?

[Abhishek sharma]

28 minutes ago, Kon-Tiki said:

I partly agree. Before you remove the recovery partition, however, I would make sure that you have another recovery medium for your laptop (USB stick for instance). The purpose of the recovery partition is to help you solve problems that occur due to a defect in your main installation (on the C partition). So while you don't need the recovery partition for day to day use I would be careful to remove it unless you have, as mentioned, another recovery medium.

Can I just copy the contents of the drive to my external HDD?

 

[Kon-Tiki]

Not in the way that you could then boot into recovery mode from your external HDD. The medium you copy the recovery partition on to must be bootable which requires more to it than just doing a simple copy-paste. I'd get a 32 GB USB drive and clone the partition in question onto it. Then try to boot of the USB stick you just created. If that works you're good to go and can delete the partition on your drive.

[Abhishek sharma]

6 minutes ago, Kon-Tiki said:

Not in the way that you could then boot into recovery mode from your external HDD. The medium you copy the recovery partition on to must be bootable which requires more to it than just doing a simple copy-paste. I'd get a 32 GB USB drive and clone the partition in question onto it. Then try to boot of the USB stick you just created. If that works you're good to go and can delete the partition on your drive.

Thanks for the reply.

One more thing, if I have taken the uefi backup and backup of my personal files seperately, I can recover my windows from that?

[Kon-Tiki]

Your personal files (i.e. documents, photos) have nothing to do with the core functionality of Windows. If you have them backed up you can copy them to wherever you want (on a newly installed system for instance).

I don't know what you exactly mean by "UEFI backup". Should you be referring to your recovery partition: Recovery means either fixing a broken installation of Windows (e.g. by replacing system relevant files) or re-installing Windows from scratch. It does explicitly not mean that you can simply restore Windows to the current state (with your programs installed and your personal settings) from a new installation. For that you need a restore point of Windows (don't quote me on the restore point, though. I've never been in a situation where something like that would have been necessary to do for me.). This restoration point however is independent of your recovery partition.