Question: Hi I’ve got a 5 year old Dell Precision T7500 – nice machine it has been too.
It was getting all clogged up with software, and I need to do some video work, so figured it was a good time for an upgrade and clean up.
I bought a new SSD drive that I want to use for OS and swap, putting the old RAID5 Perc 6 drives as slaves now to store data and documents etc.
I didn’t use any recovery disks just shoved a Win 8 disk in and installed on the new SSD. ?
Then I reconnected the Dell SAS Raid and reorganised the boot order to take the SSD first.
All good, boots fine.
Now I see 2 new drives a D: Labelled RECOVERY ?and all my old stuff on E:
Turning on “show system” files I see Logs, system32 and WindowsRE folders on that D: ?which is only 750mb big. ?Also a recycle bin that contains some files I deleted since the Reinstalled.
Can I delete this D: drive or at least not show in Explorer?
Any advice?
Thanks!
Answer: If it’s not the boot drive, I wouldn’t worry about it personally.
There are a couple different reasons that partition exists..
Back in the xp and vista days, OEMs would often put all the recovery media onto a partition on the hard drive so they didn’t have to provide recovery CDs. (Also, there was often a function on boot that will let you recover your system)
from windows 7 forward, the default install actually partitions your drive into two – a very small one for recovery tools that never gets assigned a drive letter and is only used if things go bonkers, and the regular one.
Both of these are irrelevant, as now you are booting off your SSD. You’ve already taken a look at the files on there and determined that they are useless to you. It dosen’t look like you’ll ever be downgrading back to the original OS. I’d get rid of it.