Reinstallng Win11 and drive partitions

idris17

The internal HDD of my Acer laptop has 2 partitions.
If I reinstall Win11 on C:\ using System > Recovery > Reset PC > Remove everything as described in How to Factory Reset Windows, is there any risk to files on the D:\ partition?

Puraw

https://community.acer.com/en/discussion/703612/reinstallng-win11-and-drive-partitions

Best to backup the complete HDD to a Backup drive, you can use W7 Backup create an image file app in control panel Windows11. To restore any data/partition lost during the reset, mount that backup VHD image file in File Explorer any Windows PC and copy the files/directories you want.

idris17

I understand the benefits of backing up to an external device, but I am still interested to know whether System > Recovery > Reset PC > Remove everything would attempt to remove everything from the physical HDD or just the primary partition.

billsey

It will likely work as you expect, not deleting existing partitions but reinstalling to them instead. But, as suggested, to be on the safe side do a backup of your D: first. If you do a clean install instead of a reset it's usually best to delete all partitions first, then install to the unallocated space. That will create new partitions and there will be no D:. If you want to do a clean install and keep the D: partition, use the Windows installer to manually remove all partition except D:, the install to the unallocated space.

Right now you very likely have more than two partition, BTW. You have C: and D:, but there is also a small EFI partition, and one or two Recovery partitions. You can use Disk Management to view those ones that aren't available in File Explorer.