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I was about to make partitions for dual boot, I saw there are three healthy(recovery partitions). I had previously installed Virtual Machine. I want to know why the partitions were made and how deleting them would affect the machine. The OEM is DELL with Windows 10 OS. I want to delete these partitions to use up this space.

Partitions:
Here are the partitions.

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They are most likely related to the Dell system restore/recovery mechanism that is factory pre-installed on your laptop.
I wouldn't touch them.
Removing one of them can make your system unbootable.

Actually... Shrinking C: and adding more partitions in the free space between C: and those recovery partitions may cause the same problem too.

In general: On a pre-installed computer it is usually NOT SAFE to mess with the partitions in any way. You have no way of knowing what the factory installation expects to be there. Changing it has a high chance of breaking the factory install.

If you really want to setup a dual-boot system without causing problems the safe way to do it is to wipe the WHOLE harddisk. Which will get rid of all the factory pre-installed and possible problematic stuff.
Then do a fresh clean Windows installation from scratch.
Then add the 2nd OS.

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  • This rather looks like Win10's frequent issue where it "forgets" that it has already created a recovery partition and makes a 2nd one... But everywhere I've seen, even manufacturer recovery partitions are only used for recovery -- they don't really contain any "boot" files. (Unlike e.g. the EFI System Partition, which does contain boot files and is pretty critical.) Generally PC manufacturers don't want to make life harder for themselves by inviting tons of support calls; only a few "almost embedded" products (e.g. Apple Silicon laptops) have that kind of dependency on the disk layout. Apr 15, 2021 at 11:18
  • @user1686 2 recovery partitions (one with a restore tool, the other containing the factory install image) isn't unusual. Add the normal recovery partition created by Windows itself and you have 3 of them. Main problem is that many of these pre-installed systems have EFI boot entries pointing to that restore tool partition. If that is removed or the partition numbering/order changes the system won't boot anymore. Because you can't tell from a distance how this particular PC is setup I won't recommend modifying the partitions in any way. Just too risky.
    – Tonny
    Apr 15, 2021 at 12:44
  • Even if that's the case, those additional EFI boot entries aren't used -- only the first working one, i.e. the one which boots directly into Windows, is used. The "displayorder" in bcdedit /enum firmware can be used to verify that Windows is the first boot entry. (Moreover, EFI boot entries reference a partition by its GUID, not numeric index.) Apr 15, 2021 at 12:55
  • @user1686 Many of these DON'T boot directly in Windows. They boot a shim that calls the recovery tool. The tool checks if the user pressed the special recovery key, if not it will call the Windows boot-loader or else continue loading the recovery tool. And many of those recovery tools ignore GUIDs and expect a fixed partition layout. I have personally seen this used by systems from Dell, Lenovo, MSI, Gateway, HP and Asus. And that is just the brands I'm familiar with. It is IMHO to common a practice to ignore.
    – Tonny
    Apr 15, 2021 at 13:30

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