M5-481---questions about hard drive partitions.

lithp

I accidentally overwrote my boot sector when installing Ubuntu a few months ago.  Just recently I ran the factory reset.  Everything's working fine, but looking at my drive partitions has raised some questions.

 

 

1.  At the end, I have a 16.5 GB recovery partition.  All well and good.  However, I also have a 400 MB "recovery partition" at the very beginning of the drive.  This seems odd to me, as a) I already have a recovery partition, b) 400MB seems very small, and c) as far as I know, Microsoft wants the EFI partition (300MB, also present on the disk) to be first on the drive.

 

So---should it be there?  What's it for?  If anyone doesn't know, but has a machine the partitions of which haven't tampered with, I'd love it if you could open "Disk Management," take a screenshot, and post it here.

 

2.  I noticed that I have TWO drives, one of which is about 18.5 GB and an SSD.  What is on this drive?  Can I safely format it and expose it to Windows?  EDIT:   The SSD is apparently used for fast booting.

Alan-London

I have deleted all partitions from my 120GB M5 but I did make a note before I removed them:

 

A: 400MB Recovery Partition

 

B: 100MB EFI Partition

 

C: 100.63GB NTFS Partition

 

18.00GB Recovery Partition

 

It is also possible that other partitions could exist that are not visible to Windows.

 

Yes, the SSD is cache and I don't believe it can be used for data.