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Pastimes : Computer Learning -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: SI Ron (Crazy Music Man) who wrote (96177)	4/8/2017 7:27:43 AM
From: PMS Witch	2 Recommendations Recommended By Gottfried SI Ron (Crazy Music Man) Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 110631

Missing System. . . Your laptop with Windows 7 Home has a System partition. It is a Primary partition, marked as Active and although it's 1.465 GigaBytes, only 225 MegaBytes are being used. Windows has not assigned a drive letter. This tells me that this partition contains only the files necessary to boot your system. By default, when installing Windows, one of these partitions are created. When Windows crashes, it will attempt to write "Crash Dump" data to this partition; hence, the big size relative to the small amount of data stored there currently. These "System" partitions are not necessary. Windows can be installed so that the files needed for booting are placed together with the Windows files in one partition. (In this case, "Crash Dumps" are stored there too.) As a general rule, if Windows is installed to an empty disk, a System partition is created, but when installed to a disk that is not empty, it will not create a System partition. Use Disk Management to take a peek at your disk landscape because it will display all the partitions, including Hidden, Unused, and those without drive letters assigned by Windows. It will also tell you which partitions are Primary, Extended, Hidden, Logical, Used for Booting, etc. Compare the information Disk Management displays for your different computers. You'll see that your backup images represent the content of your disks accurately. (If they don't, your worries are justified.) Note: Most imaging software skips saving files such as PageFile and Hibernation files because they're both huge and useless for recovering your system; thus, both time and disk space are saved. Cheers, PW. P.S. Although I said the System partition is not necessary, don't try removing it. When I said "Not Necessary" I meant that creating it is an option chosen by the Windows Installer. Once the Windows installer makes this choice, you're stuck with it. Removing it is beyond the scope of this message.