It would be helpful to have some solid information about the partitions installed by Dell- for recovery and other purposes.
On my 10 year old Dell Dim 9200- I wanted to install an SSD using Acronis True Image program- moving my existing drive to the new drive. I tried many ways of doing this but had no luck until I tried having Acronis NOT copy over partitions installed by Dell, including a 8 GB RECOVERY partition and a 32 MB FAT16 partition. I always knew these existed if it were necessary to restore the drive to factory condition- but I never felt a need and using a program like Acronis, I couldn't see the point. Once I had Acronis copy over only the C drive- it finally worked. The Acronis program manual does discuss hidden partitions and how to deal with them, but it didn't work for me.
So, on my newer Dell- a very nice XPS desktop from the fall of '14- which has a eSATA boot drive- I intend to install a larger one. I presume I may have to do the same thing- have Acronis NOT copy over the extraneous partions though they look different on this Dell. Here I see the following:
- a "500 mb EFI System Partition"
- a "40 mb OEM Partition"
- a "750 mb recovery partition"
- a "10.80 gb recovery partition"
Are they all expendable when I install a new eSATA drive? I presume the last one may include my original MS Office 2013. The others, I don't have a clue.
I would greatly appreciate if somebody could tell me if these are all expendable- and if Dell could elaborate as to what they are.
thanks,
Joe
