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    New Alienware 17 - help with disk management

    Discussion in 'Alienware' started by Rapscallion84, Jul 24, 2014.

  1. Rapscallion84

    Rapscallion84 Notebook Enthusiast

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    Hello,

    Yesterday I received my Alienware 17 with 1TB HDD/80GB SSD hybrid within. I quickly installed a 500 GB Samsung 840 EVO SSD, installed Windows 8.1 and drivers and will be using this as my main drive. I formatted the former Windows partition, but in Disk Management I noticed a number of partitions.

    I've attached a screenshot of the drives in question. I would like to know if there is a way to clean up these drives, or if I should just leave them as they are - I'm worried about messing up the hybrid. Also, I don't really know how the Intel Rapid Storage utility works so I didn't want to mess about with that.

    Any help you guys can provide would be greatly appreciated.

    Capture2.PNG Capture3.PNG Capture.PNG
     
    Rapscallion84, Jul 24, 2014
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  2. nick81

    nick81 Notebook Evangelist

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    Hey there

    Your setup is perfectly fine. I know because it's the same as mine :)

    You don't have a hybrid drive but a normal 1TB with an 80GB SSD used as a cache drive. And from the looks of things, everything is properly configured!
     
    nick81, Jul 24, 2014
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  3. Scale

    Scale Notebook Enthusiast

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    Those recovery partition usually contain an windows image which you can use to reinstall the OS.
    The OEM partition probably contains dell diagnostics.
     
    Scale, Jul 24, 2014
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  4. MogRules

    MogRules Notebook Deity

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    Dell diagnostics are built right in without the need for the recovery partition as well :) so if you were to clear that away as I did then you can still run diagnostics by pressing F12 for the boot menu and selecting Dell Diagnostics.

    Windows 8 likes to create a bunch of partitions, one for it's own recovery as well as the recovery section that came with your 1tb original drive that Alienware created. As long as you have made recovery DVD's/USB then I would just wipe the 1tb drive and blow away all partitions since your not using it for windows any more anyway. The 10gb partition that you see is simply extra space left over from the mSATA caching drive. There is a max size (64gb I think) that can be used for the mSATA caching option and so IRST will automatically give you a 10gb data partition as it can't be used for the cache. The rest is all Windows 8 partitions that if you were running Windows 7 you wouldn't see , but 8 does funny things haha.

    Anyway, no need to worry, nothing really looks out of place aside from the recovery partition on the 1tb but like I said you could just delete that partition and be fine and it won't show up any more, just make sure you have recovery media or your Windows DVD that came with your machine.
     
    MogRules, Jul 24, 2014
    #4