How many partitions should be on a brand new Vostro 5471

Question

I just received a new Dell Vostro 5417 with Windows 10. I had a bit of trouble creating a recovery disk at first. The documentation said to use a USB at least 16GB, and so I just bought a 16GB thumb drive and had the recovery disk creation process fail. (went through the process but in the end I received a message that said "unable to create a recovery drive" or something like that, with no further explanation.) After some research, it appears that maybe my USB wasn't large enough so I got a 32GB drive and went through the process again. The first time I ran through the disk creation process, it seemed to hang at the very end for quite a long time after the progress bar seemed completed, and I canceled the process thinking something had gone wrong. Then I started over and this time became determined to see it through. Once again it went all the way to the end with a full progress bar but then seemed to hang again. This time I let it sit for 40 minutes like that, and then finally I received a notification that the recovery drive was complete.

Because of all these false starts I began looking around the system, hoping that each time I tried to make a recovery drive it wasn't creating a new partition on the hard drive too. (I am not terribly tech savvy, so I apologize if this sounds stupid). I found that my system actually has 5 partitions on it, all of them different sizes. This is a brand new laptop and the only thing I have loaded onto it so far is some software for a Logitech universal remote. My laptop has only one drive, a 256GB SSD. I have copied and pasted the documentation I found when looking at my system information. This information includes the 5 partitions on my laptop. Please tell me, is it normal to have this many partitions? Or were all of these created as a result of my attempts to create a recovery disk?

Description Disk drive

Manufacturer (Standard disk drives)

Model TOSHIBA KSG60ZMV256G M.2 2280 256GB

Bytes/Sector 512

Media Loaded Yes

Media Type Fixed hard disk

Partitions 5

SCSI Bus 0

SCSI Logical Unit 0

SCSI Port 0

SCSI Target ID 2

Sectors/Track 63

Size 238.47 GB (256,052,966,400 bytes)

Total Cylinders 31,130

Total Sectors 500,103,450

Total Tracks 7,938,150

Tracks/Cylinder 255

Partition Disk #0, Partition #0

Partition Size 650.00 MB (681,574,400 bytes)

Partition Starting Offset 1,048,576 bytes

Partition Disk #0, Partition #1

Partition Size 224.58 GB (241,138,925,568 bytes)

Partition Starting Offset 816,840,704 bytes

Partition Disk #0, Partition #2

Partition Size 990.00 MB (1,038,090,240 bytes)

Partition Starting Offset 241,955,766,272 bytes

Partition Disk #0, Partition #3

Partition Size 11.07 GB (11,881,414,656 bytes)

Partition Starting Offset 242,993,856,512 bytes

Partition Disk #0, Partition #4

Partition Size 1.09 GB (1,167,065,088 bytes)

Partition Starting Offset 254,876,319,744 bytes

jphughan · Accepted Answer

They wouldn't have been created as a result of your attempts to create a recovery disk, but Dell does ship systems with more partitions than a bog standard Windows installation would have. I believe the extra partitions are a system image recovery partition to help you restore your system to its factory shipped state and then a partition that contains some diagnostics. The former can be used as your recovery mechanism, but of course it's only usable if the hard drive is still working and that partition is intact, which is why they recommend creating recovery media in addition as a failsafe. One option you might want to consider though is simply capturing a system image now to keep as your "baseline" state, and then using system images going forward on a periodic basis as your backup and recovery solution. Macrium Reflect Free is a popular tool for this purpose, although there are others. Keeping a baseline separate from whatever images you create going forward will allow you to return to this initial state you have now, but capturing periodic images will not only serve as a data backup mechanism, but because it includes the entire contents of your drive, if you ever have a system-wide problem like an update that goes wrong or a malware infection, you can just restore your system from a recent image and everything will be back the way it was at the time you captured that image -- your OS, applications, data, everything. Of course if you need to roll back your OS and applications but don't want to roll back your data, you'd have to back up your data before executing this type of restore and then manually copy it back onto your drive afterward, but that's still not usually too bad. Or you could create a separate partition just for your data so that you can restore your OS partition without affecting your key data, but that's admittedly a somewhat more advanced solution.

Anyway, the partitions you have are normal for a Dell build. You didn't make a mess.

artch1k · Answer

Thank you for your in depth and detailed response. I am relieved that all these partitions are normal. I will look into making regular system images to back up my computer going forward using the software you suggest.

I am very appreciative of the time you took to answer my concerns, as well as the great detail you put into the explanation.

Vostro

How many partitions should be on a brand new Vostro 5471

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