Partitions and Laptop Recovery

[Centropolis]

I have an Acer and a HP laptop. Right now, both of them have the original partitions settings: a system partition C:, a recovery partition, and a HP/Acer Tools partition. I want to shrink the system C: smaller and create a new partition just to store media files.

Assuming that I have that done next week and 6 months from now, I want to use the recovery partition to restore to original settings. Will the restore process including wiping the partition I created and go back to just the C: and the one I created with the media files gets wiped?

 

[whs]

1. Be careful, you may have a 4th primary partition - the hidden system partition. Check in Disk Management. If yes, you cannot create an additional partition without running into major trouble.

Post a picture of your Disk management. Then we can tell you what to do.

2. A system restore from the recovery would only apply to the C: partition and would not touch any other partition. But that is not the way to go about it. The right way is to make images and restore from an image. Reinstalling from the recovery partition is too much work - can take up to 2 days because of the hundreds of updates you would be getting, not to speak of the trouble reinstalling all your programs and redoing all your settings. None of that is necessary with an image - it is a 20 minute affair.

 

[Mark Phelps]

Also, it's likely that if you shrink the OS partition and THEN do a restore, it will erase that partition, and in the proces of recreating it, overwrite or damage the new partition it overlaps.

And, agree with whs that the better way for restoring is to make an image of your clean install and restore from that. That way, you don't have to reinstall your apps, or do very many Windows Updates. Also, a backup and restore using a smaller Win7 OS partition will only use that size for restore.