Windows 7: System Protection?

How does System Protection work...does it save information to a separate partition?



I have a 7gb partition on my drive that I do not know what it is for. I deleted it and was am thinking of adding it to my main C: partition. Did destroy the System Protection partition?

That partition was likely put there by the manufacturer to help you restore the PC to factory specs if you ever needed to do that.

If you in fact deleted the partition and do not have "recovery disks", you will have problems restoring to factory specs.

Do you have any install discs at all? What happens if your hard drive fails in 30 minutes?

System protection is not the same as "system restore", which you may be thinking of. System restore returns the operating system to the way it was on the date the restore point was made---typically somewhere in the last couple of weeks-----not to factory specs. System restore points are stored on your C drive along with Windows.

Can you post a screen shot of Disk Management?

I have a bunch of restore disks I made from the manufactures software just after purchasing the computer, including the OS restore software, so I'm not too concerned about that. I was just wondering if the partition had anything to do with System Restore or System Protection because I would like to delete it and then ad its space to c: partition?

It has nothing to do with System Restore.

It presumably has something to do with restoring the PC to a factory state. It could be the PC manufacturer's tools of some type.

What is in it?

If you are positive you can do whatever restoration you need to do with the discs you made, then you wouldn't need it as far as I know.

How easily you can add the space to C depends on what your Disk Management picture looks like. In one case, you can do add it to C from within Windows. In another case, you would have to use a third party application.

That's why I asked to see the picture.

Your original post says you already deleted it.

I'm using Easeus Partition Master. Here is the picture of the drive layout. The first partition is the on, I deleted all the data so it is empty now.

You can add the gray "unallocated space" at the far right to C from Windows itself.

Or I assume you can do it with Easeus.

How would I do it from within windows?

Thanks!

and the partition space is listed as un-allocated...so, will I still be able to ad it to c: or will I have to allocate it?

go to disk management

right click your C partition and you should see a choice for expand. Actually, I think it is called "extend".

There is only an option to "shrink"...could this be because the empty space is not allocated?