Series 5 - Recovery partitions empty after repair?

Windows 8 on my NP51-R5E-A01UK crashed and F4 recovery didn't work. Now the vendor has replaced the hard disc. Windows loads ok and the blue function buttons work ok.

I am determined to avoid repeating the pain of F4 Recovery not working, so I am trying to be super-careful this time before I do anything at all to the factory set-up.

First thing I did is make a bootable factory image on a Transcend 32Gb USB 2.0 drive.

Now I see in Windows Disk Management that the 'Recovery' partitions appear to be empty and not labelled. Please see attached screenshot. Does this anyway look ok to you, or have the repairers failed to install the SRS files?

I will be grateful for your advice.

TimD

 

Hello Tim, welcome to NBR.

The partitions look mostly OK. The Recovery partitions are marked as special types of partitions which are kept hidden by Windows in order to prevent accidental damage -- although structurally they're really just regular NTFS (the big Recovery Data partition) and FAT32 (the small Recovery Boot partition).

The only reason I say they "mostly" look OK is that the the Recovery Data partition is larger than anything I have seen before (they're normally 16-24GB). Maybe that is normal for your model, or maybe it is because it is not an official Samsung installation, but rather one made by a dealer.

But if you are able to boot Recovery with F4, and Samsung Recovery Soution 6 loaded alright, and you were able to create that Bootable Factory Image backup, I'd say everything sounds and looks fine.

I assume that 445GB TEMP_PART01 partition is your Data partition. If you prefer to keep most of your data on there, I would recommend shrinking the Windows partition from its current 445GB and Extend the Data partition into the empty space -- and do it before you start loading the partitions with programs and data. Minitool Partition Wizard is a great tool for such things.

 

The problem I see is that the partition size and the free space both have the same values for everything except C:

You can use Minitool Partition Wizard to see the contents (if any) of the recovery partitions.

John

 

Thank you for your advice.

Yes, I found that F4 recovery from SRS does actually work. The repairers had installed Windows 8 as was current in Sept 2013, requiring 600+MB of Windows updates for me to install. The updating got into a complete mess and, after several hours of "configuring updates" and restarting n times the laptop failed to re-boot at all. So, I hit F4 and it successfully re-installed the system back to square one and Windows is eventually up to date.

As you suggested, I used Minitool Partition Wizard to look at the contents of the various partitions. Partition Wizard confirms that there is some stuff in the recovery partitions (which of course there must be for F4 to work). Unlike Windows Disc Management which showed that the recovery partitions were empty ("100% free") - I now trust Windows even less to tell me the truth.

I have couple of further questions, if you can bear with me:
I want to make 12 partitions on the laptop HDD. If I use Partition Wizard for this, will it respect the magic F4 linkage to the Recovery partitions?

But I never want to have to start from the factory settings again: I will anyway save the whole C: partition to a back-up using the Easeus tool that I have used before. But I should also make alternative backups of the current state using the Samsung tools (as they are there)....

When using the Samsung Backup function (in 'Recovery') and selecting an external HDD, I assume that the backup will be made on the external HDD without wiping existing data on the target HDD - is that correct?

I have in mind also to use Samsung Disc Copy onto an identical 1TB HDD (that I bought when trying to fix the original problem myself). Any advice using 'Disc Copy' to do this?

Are there any other backups that you would advise?

Thanks a lot for your help so far,
TimD.

 

Thanks for your comment, John.

Partition wizard did indeed show that the Recovery partitions are not in fact empty, and F4 does actually work (please see my reply to Dannemand).

TimD

 

Thank you for the update, Tim.

You already have a Factory Image Backup on a USB stick, which is your preferred way to re-image the disk to factory state if SRS should be damaged or F4 should stop working. A secondary backup can be great as a precaution in case the USB stick should fail (which has been known to happen), and PARTICULARLY if you will be wiping the disk or performing operations that might be risky to Recovery.

The post here attempts to sum all all the different ways of backing up and re-creating SRS on a disk. It covers SRS5 (and earlier) as well as SRS6, and is, admittedly, not the simplest guide (even for my verbose standard ). It was written in an attempt to gather in a single place all the various techniques that I have been posting (and re-posting) in hundreds of individual posts.

In essence, you want to create another Factory Image, but this time on an external drive and with the Create Boot Disk option disabled. This image can only be restored using a working Recovery (F4). In addition you want to create a so-called Admin Tool USB which fits on a 1GB USB stick (preferably non-SanDisk USB2). This can be used to create a working Recovery and F4 on a new (or newly wiped) disk. There are other ways, including a full Clonezilla disk image. It's all covered in that post.

Backing and restoring just your Windows partition is normally safe. I do that all the time (using an older imaging tool from Terabyte Unlimited), and so do others (using various 3rd party tools such as Acronis). EaseUS has been reported to rewrite the partition table (and hence destroy F4) so I cannot generally recommend it -- although I don't know for sure if that applies when only imaging/restoring the Windows partition.

Of course you can also use the Backup feature in SRS, which lets you save a Restore Point of the current system, either to the internal HDD or to an external one. If you do use that, make sure you don't rename the files and folders it creates on the target disk. Also, make sure you have a working SRS to restore it!

The Disk Copy feature in Recovery is useful if you want to swap in a different drive (such as an SSD to replace the originall SSD/HDD) since it preserves your existing Windows installation and data files. AND it preserves Recovery. All partitions must fit on the target drive, so when cloning from a larger HDD to a smaller SSD, partitions must first be shrunk to fit. The post here covers that.

And creating partitions with Minitool should be safe as well. 12 partitions is a new one for me, but I guess that's one of the things made possible by UEFI/GPT. BIOS/MBR limits you to four primary partitions (and course logical partitions).

But do create those backups before you start these ventures. Better safe than sorry...

 

I would add that creating additional partitions in space created by shrinking the C and D drives should not upset SRS. The important thing is to not move the recovery partitions. SRS appears to store an absolute address in the BIOS or NVRAM and gets confused if the partition is moved.

John

 

Thank you for the very comprehensive advice. I am now part-way through doing all the backup possibilities you mentioned - before touching disc partitions.

Your mention of Easeus re-writing the partition table is very timely. I'll stick with Minitool on the laptop.

Actually, for years now, I have used multiple partitions in Win XP. My main box houses two physical drives containing 10 and 6 primary + logical partitions respectively. I find it practical and with no drawbacks - I'm always surprised that others find it surprising!

Thanks again
TimD

 

That does sound likely. In which case I suspect that in making lots of logical partitions on my laptop's original HDD using the Easeus Partition tool, the SRS partitions got moved, resulting in F4 not working. I will tread much more carefully this time....

Thanks, John.
TimD

 

That's no surprise to me. For historical reasons I've got a C, D, E, F and G originally set up in the days when large partitions had slower access and I carry the same file structure over when I change computers so i know where to find things.

John

 

I strongly agree with the principle of having separate Data partitions, which I have used myself for many years. I used to have 2-3 Data partitions, but now I only have a single partition, with folders for different types of content.

The benefits are clear: It allows updating and replacing Windows installations with ease, without affecting the data. I have two Windows partitions (one for test) sharing the same Data partition.

The drawbacks I can see are:

1) It takes some work and discipline setting up a new Windows installation to direct all user data to the Data partition. Personally I don't move the entire User folder (with the AppData and all), only my Documents, Favorites, Pictures, Music, and Video folders, all of which are in a new user folder on the Data partition. Of course all other data is saved there as well.

2) For each extra partition, some space is wasted by not having free space pooled together. You want a fair amount of free space on the Windows partition, even if it's never used, so that becomes unavailable as Data space. The same is true, to some extent, for each extra Data partition. On a small SSD, this can be enough to make it impractical. Of course with a big HDD it is much less of an issue.

I really like your belt AND suspenders approach to data management. Most people only appreciate that after a catastrophic data loss. For me it took a nasty lesson 20+ years ago to learn it.