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I was about to partition my hard drive today when I found that in Disk Management I have four partitions other than my C: drive that have 100% free space.

What are those partitions? Can I get rid of them so that all of their space can go to my C: drive?

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3 Answers 3

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This looks like a Lenovo system.

If it is, then the partitions are:

  • OEM Partition: backup copies of drivers for re-installations
  • EFI Partition: created by Windows when it was installed; needed for boot
  • Recovery Partitions: stores the Lenovo OneKey Recovery software, and a factory image of the system; these are optional, and can be deleted if you don't use this feature

These drives have a custom raw file system that only firmware can read, not Windows. Hence Windows does not recognise them as valid drives, cannot detect any files on them, and is forced to label them as 'voids'.

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Yes, blow them up. If it's a branded PC, one of them will likely be a recovery partition accessible by pressing Alt+F11 on startup or some other key combo. Who would want to restore to factory defaults with all that bloat wear anyway. Ah, you can see, one say OEM partition, another say, yea, exactly what I thought. BLOW IT UP!!

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    "Who would want to restore to factory defaults..." Someone who wants their CD key to work after a reload? Someone who wants built-in hardware diagnostics?
    – DigitalMan
    May 7, 2015 at 3:26
  • New OEM systems (win 8.1) rely on the bios to provide the cd key. :/ It's worth installing the diagnostics from the downloads rather than deal with the bloatware. May 7, 2015 at 3:28
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Yes... and no.

Technically, those partitions can likely be removed and the space used just as normal.

However, that you have to ask indicates that you probably do not have the required expertise to recover the system otherwise. I'm not calling you a n00b, and I'm not going to downvote your question - I've just seen way too many instances of people having to buy the official recovery media from the manufacturer (which will recreate those partitions) because they deleted something they should not have.

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