Windows 8 Understanding New Partitions After Windows 8.1 Upgrade and Addressing Compatibility Issues

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JerryFerreira

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After upgrading(?) to Windows 8.1, I now have more partitions on my hard drive. Can anyone tell me which ones are needed? The upgrade has caused other problems, mainly that I can't use my Microsoft Office Click-to-Run USB.

I have a Gateway DX 4870 that came with Windows 8, and a Gateway Recovery Management.

Attached is a snapshot of the Disk Management.
 

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Certain ways of upgrading are adding an additional 350 MB recovery partition because the 300 MB partition normally used is not large enough to allow shadow copies to be made and a System Image be created. I see you have a 400 MB partition, so perhaps the install is assuming you have the older type.

I have only seen that partition added if you had used the Setup utility from within Windows 8 to upgrade to Windows 8.1. But I have seen comments about a Windows 8.1.1 update which would do the same thing.

But OEM systems have additional partitions for reasons I do not understand. If you knew exactly which one was added, it might help. Until then, if you could open an administrative command prompt and run the following command and attach the results, it might be helpful.

reagentc /info
 
Firstly, thanks for replying so quickly.
I ran reagentc /info. Attached is a window snip of the results. Hope this sheds some light.
 
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The information seems to indicate the 350 MB partition is currently set up as the Recovery Tools partition, which is what boots into the recovery environment. It also shows you still have the Reset to Factory Image in the large recovery partition.

Since I do not know what is still in the other hidden partitions, I cannot suggest anything regarding those. If you were to put a drive letter on them using Diskpart, you could look inside to see what might be there. I many cases, using the command prompt and the dir /a command will yield more information that trying to see them from Windows. A Third party utility might also be able to see inside the partitions from outside windows, and I know Partition Wizard bootable version can do that. There are probably others also.

If you look into the Recovery partitions, if you can see what is in them, also try to see how much free space the smaller recovery partitions have. But the safest thing to do is probably leave it as it is.
 
I think I'm going to have to leave it as is. I had made a complete backup of Disk0 (with AOMEI Backupper) before 8.1 update, but when I try to restore the backup, a notification came up stating that it can't restore because of UEFI (paraphrased).

I thought of going back to Windows 7 Pro; I've even tried to install my Windows 7 Pro on my other cleared hard drive (Disk1), but that's not working out (kept getting error "windows is unable to install to the selected location error 0x80300001, etc.)

I've been working with/on computers for about 25 years (since the days of DOS) and getting so frustrated with the years of added "safety" features that make it so hard to EASILY maintain/revise a home computer.

With the research I've been doing about the 8.1 update, I'm one of the lucky ones. Some can't even get their computers to boot.

Thank you so much Saltgrass for looking into my situation. I really do appreciate your time and effort. Hope to see you in the forums now and again.
 
I just did a Store Update to 8.1 and even though I had mine set up with a 500 MB Recovery Partition, the Update added the 350 MB one anyway. I checked through the contents of the different partitions and it did create a recovery tools image in that new partition. I could change it back, since I know how to move files and re-register the recovery environment, but this install will be history shortly. I am just testing to see what needs to be done to recover back to 8 from 8.1. For Non-OEMs, it is fairly simple, but the OEM configurations complicate things a little.

The UEFI thing basically concerns the configuration of the drive and the media you are booting to. If you need to recover a UEFI image, boot to the UEFI version of the media. If you are trying to recover to either configuration and the drive has partitions and set as the opposite configuration, it will give you that type of message. I normally use Diskpart to Clean my drives at the Pick a Language page using Shift+F10 (do not do this if trying to install an upgrade version of software that depends on a previous install). Then the install sees it as clean. You could also remove the current partitions in the partitions dialog during the install. But different situations may require a specific procedure be used.
 

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I was just able to reset an 8.1 system back to an 8.0. I had been trying, but I thought the backward version was not letting the Reset work.

This system I just set up as described above. After the reset, the Windows Recovery Tools was moved back to the 500 MB partition it was originally. We will have to keep an eye on this to see if Microsoft is going to use this process of creating a new Recovery Tools partition, to allow Resets. The registration for the Recovery Image partition was never changed, so the Reset image was still the same in both versions.

This was a freshly upgraded system, and the Windows.old and $Windows.~BT folders were still present on the drive.
 
I have an OEM version of Windows 8, so I'm not going to fight it. Basically, everything's working fine. It's the Microsoft Office Starter To-Go USB flash drive that won't run. It gives me this message (attached is the screen cap). Worked before 8.1 update.
 

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