What is "OEM Partition" on my factory installed SSD boot drive?

I've had two new T530's, one with a HD in the main bay as boot drive and a second with a Lenovo installed SSD in the main bay as boot drive.

The HD had four partitions, including a 10.2GB one called "Recovery Partition" by Disk Management. The SSD has the same four partitions of the same size plus a fifth partition of 7GB called "OEM Partition". I can't figure out from searches what this OEM partition is, and two guys at Lenovo Technical Support have no idea.

The Recovery and OEM partitions chew up 17GB of a 180 GB drive, which is really only 167GB in decimal terms to begin with.

Any ideas or info as to what the OEM Partition is, and why it's factory installed on an SSD but not on a HD?

 

No one knows? Well, even more folks and Lenovo can't explain it either.

Another anomaly between the HD T530 and the SSD T530. From the factory, the HD had about 25GB of used space in the C Partition; the SSD has about 35GB of used space. No one can explain the extra 10GB factory load to me either.

If I had just kept the HD machine and swapped in an SSD after market as so many of you do, I presumably wouldn't have the 7GB OEM Partition or the extra 10GB in the C Partition. Would such a swap have worked without all this extra code and partitioning? Surely folks have done such swaps on factory W8 machines. Puzzling.

I experimented with recovery drives. When you create a recovery drive in Windows 8 you have the option of copying the "recovery partition" onto the USB recovery drive and deleting it from the source (C) drive. So I did that after doing a W8 reset. The Recovery Partition disappeared from my SSD, I got 10GB more free space, but the 7GB OEM Partition stayed on the SSD.

Then I did a restore two different ways using my recovery USB drive. The SSD went back to factory state except that the Recovery Partition was still not there. The OEM Partition was.

So it appears that once you delete the Recovery Partition during the W8 recovery media creation process it can't be restored back onto the C drive, and there is no way to get rid of the OEM Partition -- at least with the tools and amateur knowledge I possess.

 

Consider burning GParted Live ( here) to a CD/DVD and boot to it for a live session (F12 for boot device selection menu). Make sure you format/delete the correct partition (data loss can't be simply undone).

Note: Backup your data in case the partition is a system required partition.

 

See Sample: Configure UEFI/GPT-Based Hard Drive Partitions by Using Windows Setup for a design explanation.

 

SNAFU!

When you go with the factory setup of either Windows 8 (as you did) or Windows 7 (as I did), it always (and I mean 100% always) comes with various types of added software bloat.

My only guess is that the factory setup of an SSD boot drive comes with extra software bloat.

And the very new Windows 8 is another possibility.

Re-building a Windows OS boot drive from scratch (fresh install) is a bit of a tricky thing to do on a laptop computer.

The attraction is that there is zero bloatware.

Lessee... you already sent back the T530 with the boot HDD. Right?

So you have a new T530 with a factory boot SSD and a 2nd SSD in the DVD bay. Right?

Pop out the 2nd SSD and find out if it will boot without the 2nd SSD.

Coz if it will, you might be able to back up the boot SSD to a HDD (in the DVD bay) via free Clonezilla.

That's what I'm going to explore for myself. I expect to find out in the next 10 days, and will post my results (one way or the other) in the T530 owner's thread.

I suggest that you not charge off on this by yourself (with Clonezilla) as it is potentially dangerous for a non techie like you.

Since you don't seem adverse to spending money, an easier cloning option is to buy Acronis backup CD disc. It used to be bootable, and if it still is I suggest using it that way and NOT loading it into Windows 8. And without checking, I remember mention of if you have a SSD drive you may need to buy a higher priced version of Acronis?

If there are any gotchas with cloning a drive that has Windows 8 as one of the partitions, Acronis is more likely to be able to do it sooner than Clonezilla.

So if you buy Acronis, and boot it and clone the SSD to a HDD, the acid test will be for you to pop out the SSD from your T530 and put in the HDD and see if it boots.

So you need to get over your hangup with touching the innards of the hardware.

 

Thanks, but I don't understand it.

 

The factory load is backed up on a bootable USB 3.0 drive. I can boot and restore from that USB onto the primary bay SSD (using two different methods) with or without the storage SSD in the ultrabay. I think what's in the ultrabay is irrelevant.

In W8 you can create recovery drives, restore, reset, refresh and image/restore all with W8 itself, using no Lenovo software or any 3rd party software. I think I'll write a small tutorial on these things, all of which (except imaging) I have experimented with on my former two T530's.

Former.

I currently have no T530. I returned the second (SSD) one for repeated BSOD's and device disablings when Lenovo tech support said it probably needed a new motherboard. I'm currently pondering whether to bother re-ordering a third one while Lenovo sales struggles to answer my questions posed in this thread.

My z61t still works fine -- but now I'm sitting here with 16GB of memory, an SSD, a caddy, and some other accessories I bought for the 530. I probably should have waited until Lenovo and MS got more experience with new model hardware under W8.

 

I wish you could just turn on the tool, do whatever you need to do with the tool, then turn off the tool. But, somehow, that does not seem pleasantly possible with computers. Not yet, anyway.

I'm not surprised.

You could sell them at the Forum Marketplace. Well, one lives and learns -- no matter the age. Windows 8 can wait a year. The upgrade parts can wait a few weeks.

Regarding this thread, I was perhaps the first person who read it. I could have given a comprehensive answer, but decided not to. Reason? I simply cannot find a way to explain without going into technical details and using technical terms that seem to annoy you (as in previous posts).

 

Kaso, keep in mind that this topic (like all topics) is for the benefit of all future readers and not just the OP (me) who intially poses the topic. So, I encourage anyone with technical knowledge to respond in any way they think would be informative on the issues raised, for the collective benefit of the current and future audience of readers.

You have perhaps misread my reaction to something in the past. I'm not annoyed by technical terms. I strive to understand them, though I may seek clarifications. I also do my best to research things before I ask questions, but research often struggles in an unfamiliar technical field.

 

I drop by to read posts for fun and to provide advice, whenever I can, for fun. There is no compensation. When doing a paid job, I treat a cranky customer with a smile. When offering information for free, unappreciative attitude gets my silence.

I'm not motivated by "the collective benefit of the current and future audience of readers."

 

Sorry, I should have sent you to the parent document at How to Configure UEFI/GPT-Based Hard Drive Partitions. It is a little easier on the brain. Then of course there is the FAQ at Windows and GPT FAQ which has some good information.

 

Wrong.

You want to pop out the ultrabay, and then boot the computer without it.

If it boots (and my guess is that it will), then you have the option to plug in a HDD into the ultrabay.

 

TH, I actually found that link in the first document, and I'm struggling to understand them.

What I understand is that these MS doucuments say that in UEFI systems, a disk should have a minimum of four default partitions. They then say you can add a fifth partition, which they call a "Recovery Image" partition.

There are several problems with technical terminology in all fields. One problem is that there are often multiple technical names for the same thing. Thus I'm not sure that the names these MS documents give to the partitions are the same names that Lenovo uses or that different tools (such as Disk Mangement or File Manager) use. Nor is it clear that all these partitions are even visible via the various tools, regardless of the partition nomenclature.

I'm at the stage of wondering how "Recovery Image" in these docs relates to the W8 partitions under Disk Manager called "Recovery Partition" and "OEM Partition".

I'm also reading a thread on another forum where the OP is asking about a T530 with a Lenovo installed 180GB SSD boot drive under Windows 7. He wants to know whether he can delete a 16GB recovery partition on his "Q drive". There is no "Q" apparently in W8 nomenclature, but I note that the 16GB he is asking about is close to the sum of my 10GB Recovery Partition and 7GB OEM Partition.

So I'm now wondering if these two partitions aren't just a breakout of something that used to be within one partition under W7. However, even if true, that doesn't answer for me yet the question of why the OEM partition shows up in the SSD build machine but not the HD build machine.

I don't like threads to get off topic on tangential observations. However, I'll note that many topics are specific advice topics, such as: What do I buy? Which is better? How do I do X? This is not a specific advice topic, but rather a general information or educational topic: Why is the software/hardware configured in such a way and what is it doing?

 

I was just pointing you at some of the foundation documents. There is a lot more research and training required if you really want to learn all that stuff.

 

Well, I've surely done just about everything in life wrong.

I can only report factually that I have booted from my USB recovery drive with nothing in the ultrabay and with an empty SSD in the ultrabay during my experiments. I kept all data off my ultrabay SSD during my experiments. If it's better practice to remove the ultrabay drive when booting from USB, I'll keep that in mind for the future.

I suppose I self-created this booting tangent, but it was in the context of explaining that the 10GB so-called Recovery Partition is (or rather, can be) copied onto a W8 boot USB drive. I'm not sure whether the so-called OEM Partition is so copied when one elects that process, and I no longer have a T530 disk manager to examine that USB drive.

 

I have a sense of that.

Odds are that you have the Computer Management program found at Windows > Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Storage > Computer Management

A far more overall useful program to make the effort to learn to use is the free Gparted program. Which can be downloaded as an .iso file, and that .iso file can be used to directly create either a bootable CD disc, and/or a bootable USB flash memory stick.

 

Yes, thanks, XP has that tool.

Looking on the USB drive, the only things I see that seem to relate to partitions are two zipped folders labeled "SDRIVE" and "WDRIVE".

FEI, the space taken up on the USB recovery drive is 7.98GB. I pointed out in another thread that W8 specifies at least an 8GB drive while Lenovo recommends at least a 16GB drive. I used a 16.