1 Rookie
•
7 Posts
0
845
May 6th, 2022 21:00
New to SSD system, question about partitions
Aloha,
Brand new 3450 SFF Win11 Pro Workstation with C1 M.2 PCIe boot SSD (11th Gen Intel CPU), and 1TB PCIe NVMe(TM) Gen4 M.2 SSD.
When viewing details of Storage using Speccy, it shows the following:
PC SN810 NVMe WDC 1024GB (SSD)
Interface Unknown
Capacity 953 GB
Real size 1,024,209,543,168 bytes
RAID Type None
S.M.A.R.T
S.M.A.R.T not supported
Partition 0
Partition ID Disk #0, Partition #0
File System FAT32
Volume Serial Number 406B2846
Size 196 MB
Used Space 93 MB (47%)
Free Space 102 MB (53%)Partition 1
Partition ID Disk #0, Partition #1
Disk Letter C:
File System NTFS
Volume Serial Number 886CEFD3
Size 951 GB
Used Space 279 GB (29%)
Free Space 671 GB (71%)
Partition 2
Partition ID Disk #0, Partition #2
File System NTFS
Volume Serial Number 36622B40
Size 989 MB
Used Space 530 MB (53%)
Free Space 459 MB (47%)
Partition 3
Partition ID Disk #0, Partition #3
File System NTFS
Volume Serial Number CC5DE287
Size 1.36 GB
Used Space 936 MB (67%)
Free Space 452 MB (33%)
During the setup period, after installing some Win apps, I did implement the WSL, installing Ubuntu successfully.
I am just trying to wrap my head around how this all fits together... Is the boot drive shown here? No other drive shows up. What is actually on the boot drive? The whole OS, or just some startup files? Did installing Ubuntu create one or more of these partitions, or where does it reside and/or save files or docs to? I see nothing id'd as "recovery", so at present the only recovery would be a download from Dell?
Thanks for reading...
NJDave
2 Intern
•
404 Posts
0
May 7th, 2022 13:00
Check out this post from a few years back, which should still be relevant. Speccy doesn't seem to be flagging your recovery partitions as such; you can probably see informative labels in the Disk Management portion of the Windows' Computer Management app.
On your SSD, partition 0 is the boot partition (EFI system partition); partition 1 is your C drive. Partition 2 is Windows' standard recovery partition, aka Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE), which provides all the blue-screen options available from the recovery menu in Settings. I believe it's updated every time you do a feature update in Windows, i.e., when its version number changes. Partition 3 is the Dell recovery partition, which allows you to restore your system to its factory state. This isn't accessible from Settings (as far as I know). You can initiate a factory restore via SupportAssist OS Recovery from your Dell pre-boot menus (F12). In case your recovery partition gets corrupted, you can also run SupportAssist OS Recovery over the network, or create bootable factory recovery media. Installing Windows from Microsoft media creates the WinRE partition but not the Dell one. (There is actually yet another partition which is usually hidden: the Microsoft Reserved (MSR) partition that all GPT-initialized disks have.)
I've never played with WSL, though I may give it a whirl now. From what I can see, its virtual file system actually is made up of files/directories in %localappdata% (on your C drive) with an abstracted view presented to your Linux environment. It doesn't create/format any new partitions on your SSD.
DELL-Cares
Moderator
•
27.3K Posts
0
May 7th, 2022 11:00
Thank you! We have received the required details. We will work towards a resolution. In the meantime, you may also receive assistance or suggestions from the community members.
DELL-Cares
Moderator
•
27.3K Posts
0
May 9th, 2022 09:00
Thank you! We have received the details you shared. We will continue the conversation via private messages as the interactions may include user as well as Dell centric information.