Recovery Partition on Asus Zenbook UX31A after a Fresh Install

Hi all,

I bought a Asus Zenbook UX31 a recently with Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit. I used the most-useful thread on these forums to do a fresh installation on this machine. I was unable to install from USB via BIOS due to "missing CD/DVD required issue". I ended up installing Windows by clicking on "Setup.exe" in the USB thumb drive created by the Windows ISO->USB tool. It installed Windows and then I updated the drivers.

Now, my system is working fine. No issues per se. I am just concerned about any future crash. I realize that the SSD has multiple partitions and one of them is about 10 GB that Asus OEM installation created for recovery. I presume it has the Asus Windows installation and I can recover using it via F9 if I ever need to. However, that would bring back the Asus Windows and not my new/clean fresh installation.

Question 1 - can I update (create?) the recovery partition to have my fresh/clean Windows installation? Or is that controlled only by Asus software like AI Recovery which I don't have?

question 2 - Do I even need this recovery partition? Should I just create an offline Windows recovery image and boot DVD using a USB hard-drive and USB disk drive? Would that be preferable to using the Asus recovery partition?

Question 3 - If I don't need recovery partition then can I delete it somehow and add the 10GB to my primary OS partition somehow?

Thanks a lot! I apologize for newbie questions but I searched quite a bit on these forums and other sites but didn't get answer to my specific questions.

Regards,
Guraaf

 

1: You can not update the recovery partition to have your own fresh/clean Windows installation, it only work with Asus Ai Recovery program and BIOS with F9.

2: Apparently not since you have your Windows ISO USB Tool and you already did clean install.

3: Yes you can delete the recovery partition by go to Command Prompt and type "Diskpart" and select the Asus recovery partition and type: delete partition override, after the partition is deleted you can go to Windows Disk management and extend the C drive.

 

Thanks GenTechPC. That is really helpful. Regards,

 

I deleted the 10GB partition but am unable to extend the C: partition. Disk Management says that my drive looks like:

Disk 0
200 MB (EFI Sys Partition) 101.28 GB OS C: (NTFS Healthy) 4 GB (Healthy) 9.89 GB (Unallocated)

Is the 4GB partition preventing the 101.28 GB preventing from being extended because it is in the middle of C: and unallocated? If so, what is this 4GB partition? Is it related to Rapid Start technology for quicker suspend/resume? Any ideas how I can move the 10GB towards C:?

Thanks,
Guraaf

 

The 4 GB is likely the hibernation partition. Does it not have a description like what I have in the screenshot?

 

I have attached a screen shot of the partitions of my laptop's disk. Does this give a clue? Thanks a ton!! I really appreciate all your pointers and help.

 

Yes it's because the 4GB partition in the middle that's why you can't extend the C drive. It's not related to Rapid start technology and if there is nothing in there you can just delete it and extend your C drive.

 

Aye, the partitions need to be contiguous to be extended. The 4GB partition may be the RST/Hibernate partition after all, seeing as how this laptop comes with 4 GB of RAM and the size of the hibernation partition must be equal or larger than the amount of system memory.