Drive structure?

While I've been working with and building computers for decades, this is my very first laptop, a Lenovo G560. (Hatehatehatethiskeyboard!) It has a peculiar partition structure that I was hoping to find an explanation for.

First, there's an unlettered boot partition. It's the active partition, and I can assign a letter to it, then access it. Not much of interest, but there is a file named BCD (no extension) that is always open in the system, thus not possible to even copy. 1) Is this going to be standard windows, or something special for Lenovo laptops, that I need to preserve?

Then there's the C partition for the OS, a small D partition for drivers and applications (which I've saved off to optical disk), and a hidden OEM partition that (I guess) holds the recovery options.

2) Must I have any of this, assuming I don't really like or care about the "Factory" setup? Can I repartition the whole drive and install Windows just as I would if it were a brand new desktop system I'd just put together? (That is, ONE partition, active and bootable, for Windows, and maybe a separate data partition)?

Or is there something on the boot or OEM partitions that I need to keep, something about this structure that is required?

 

I heard smth about a structure once... but I suggest you delete all partitions except recovery one. Create 1 when installing Windows and another one for data.

 

The unlettered drive is reserved for the Windows OS, if you're planning to keep the factory installation then it's best to leave this well alone as it may affect the system ability to boot into the main OS.

But if you're confident on doing a clean installation anyway you can wipe out the unlettered system reserved drive, the C: drive and the recovery partition so you can start from scratch. You can keep the existing D: drive if it contains the necessary drivers as you can save time installing the missing drivers by pointing to that directory. You can always expand, shrink or delete the D: partition later if you want to.

Though before doing anything its wise to make a set of Recovery Discs beforehand if your system allows you to do this.

 

Windows 7 creates an invisible boot partition at the start of the drive, so it's fairly normal.

 

The BCD file reacts normally and looks normal under BCDEdit, etc., so unless somebody tells me different I'm going to assume it's standard.

That's a definite yes on the recovery disks. I have childlike faith that those will get me running again, no matter what I do to the drive short of physical damage. But I had to get McAfee's help to get rid of their preinstalled stuff, so I am not fond of the "factory" state of this machine. I made another recovery set that's supposed to reflect the current system.

Win7 doesn't create a boot partition on my desktop. Or at least, I can't see one in Drive Management. Is that something that Windows does only on laptops? If so, are there controls? (how big, what's in it, etc?)

I would normally charge ahead, but it is my first notebook, as I said. Don't want to screw it up in the first week.

 

The Windows Uninstall list works just fine for this...

Windows 7 setup won't try to create a boot partition under certain conditions (already maxed out primary partitions, etc.), so it'll work just fine. Some Windows things like BitLocker prefer/demand the extra partitions though.

 

Nope. Doesn't even appear on the installed programs list, and if you try to remove it in other ways, it fires off the recovery process which wipes out everything you've done and restores it to factory.

The McAfee support specialist had to install and run McAfee's own removal utility to get it off.