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What are these partitions?
I'm not exactly sure what all of the partitions shown in disk manager are for. I would almost bet the farm that I didn't have this many partitions when I originally bought my laptop.
The laptop came with Win8 and I upgraded to 8.1 as it rolled out.
A few months ago I did a factory restore as well.
It's also possible I may have installed Dell Backup and Recovery more than once, I'm wondering if this has something to do with it. It just seems something is wrong and that I shouldn't have that many partitions, I certainly don't remember there being that many when I first got it.
In particular I'm wondering about the 6 recovery partitions, 5 that are small and within disk manager appear to be empty. Though I do believe the 6th recovery partition, the large one does actually have the recovery data; because at one point I used a third party tool that indicated it wasn't 100% free space as disk manager shows.
There is also a 490 mb partition that is unallocated, , really confused by that, I'm sure that wasn't there originally.
I've done some reading here and elsewhere about this, but I'm still confused as to why I have 10 partitions, what they are, and what is necessary.
If anyone can give me some insight on this I would really appreciate it.
Here is a screenshot of Disk Manager:
Inspiron 15R (5537, Mid 2013)
Philip_Yip
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May 31st, 2015 23:00
DVDs are rejected by newer security technologies such as UEFI and SecureBoot. This is why my guides stress a FAT32 formatted USB flash drive made with Rufus.
A dual boot is also a bit more tricky with UEFI and SecureBoot and in my opinion not worthwhile. Modern hardware is more than capable of running Windows as the host machine and Linux as a Virtual machine. I frequently use VMware Player for this:
http://dellwindowsreinstallationguide.com/installation-of-windows-and-linux-on-a-virtual-machine-using-vmware-player/
Philip_Yip
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May 30th, 2015 23:00
Clean install Windows 8.1 with Update 1:
http://dellwindowsreinstallationguide.com/download-microsoft-windows-and-office/download-microsoft-windows/download-windows-8-1-retail-and-oem-iso/
Ensure you use the correct edition.
dsr10
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May 31st, 2015 20:00
Hi Philip,
Thanks for the reply. Am I safe in assuming you think a clean install is what I should do?
I've been reading your excellent guides about reinstalling, thanks for all you work. I do have a couple of questions though.
I see USB media is mentioned in many places, can I use DVD instead? I believe so, I just want to be certain.
Will installation take care of all partitioning, or do I need to wipe the drive as mentioned in your guides?
I intend to dual boot with a Linux distro, is there anything else I need to consider doing before I install Windows?
I used to be fairly adept at this type of thing, but it seems my knowledge is outdated once Win8 came along, so thanks for all the help!
dsr10
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June 1st, 2015 00:00
I had that nagging feeling in the back of my head that I should ask you about the DVD, even though I thought it was okay.
I didn't notice the Linux guide before, I'll go check that out after I get Windows reinstalled.
I guess I'm ready to dig into your guide again and get this installation moving. I couldn't have done it without you. Thanks again for all your help.