ASUS delete recovery partitions

Hello all. I am looking for some help regarding the recovery partitions on my Asus laptop.

I'd like to remove all the recovery partitions on disk and create a cleaner disk layout. The following attachment shows how the disk is now.



I have created a recovery usb flash drive using the tools provided in windows 8. I also dual-boot win 8.1 along with Ubuntu.

Which partitions can I remove/erase? Normally I wouldn't give it a second thought but I'm a bit hesitant because I don't want to loose windows' activation...

Please help.

 

All the ones listed in MB size should be safe to erase. You wont lose activation as that is stored in the BIOS.

 

Thank you for your response. Much appreciated.

May I ask, what about the other partitions, such as the 20,01 GB recovery partitions? The 19,53 GB partition is currently for Ubuntu along with the 1,95 partition (swap) so those I would change.

Also, the first 300MB partition is the EFI partition, which I would leave untouched.

So, if it is safe to remove all these partitions, any recommendations how to setup a completely new partition table?

I was thinking something along these lines;

The 300MB EFI partition leaving it alone,
Deleting all the rest and creating new partitions using a bootable Linux USB flash drive as such:
300 MB EFI (the original partition)
160GB primary partition NTFS ( C: )
200GB primary partition NTFS/FAT32 shared between Windows & Linux ( D: )
80GB primary partition EXT4 ( Ubuntu )
Anything else for Linux swap area.

How does this sound?

Thank you guys.

 

Those partitions were created/required by Windows.
If you are switching completely, then just remove them all.
As long as you have burned the recovery disc set then you don't need the partitions.

 

Wonderful. Thank you for your response.

As such, I will boot with a USB flash drive with Ubuntu and delete the partitions and create new ones. Then I'll reboot and boot with the Windows recovery USB flash drive that I created using the tools that come with Windows 8.1 and hopefully I will be able to install Windows on the new partitions. Finally, I'll install Ubuntu and configure a dual boot system.

I'll write back to say how it went. Wish me luck...

 

Windows 8.1 will re-create all the partitions it needs when it installs, so yes putting the disk back to a clean state will be fine.

 

You are most welcome, feel free to post any questions or updates afterwards.

 

Hi guys. I would like to post how all this went for me. Sorry for taking quite a bit to reply...

To start off, I'd like to say that after deleting most of the partitions on the disk (I left the first two partition intact as I wasn't sure how the Windows 8 Recovery would react without them - look at the attachment in the first post) and creating new partitions using a Linux live USB drive all seemed to go well, at first anyway.

The first hiccup was that the Windows Recovery refuse to refresh/reset the PC without repartitioning the drive. The error was that a missing system partition was needed. OK, I thought, create new partitions. The recovery went smoothly after. Not sure if it removed all the partitions or not but it did create only one large partition ( C: ) and a 12GB recovery partition at the end of the drive, again...

I then shrank that partition and created one new partition, D: and removed the new 12GB recovery partition (not in that order). I then updated to Windows 8.1 and, somehow, a new partition appeared in between C: and D:. If it was there before, I didn't notice... Everything went without any hassle.

The last thing I did was install Linux and creating the partitions using the installer. Until now, no problems.

It was quite an adventure and some disk space was recovered but ultimately the layout of the drive was not cleaned up, as can be seen in the attached image. Also, Windows was immediately activated on first boot, so no worries there.

To finish up, I'd like to say that this was done on a S46CM Asus laptop. Hope this might help someone else in the future...

Thanks guys for all the help and support.