10 hours ago, bendejo said:

 

Do you know what this FAT32 partition is about?

I thought it had to do with MS licensing but I notice Daffy doesn't have one.  My next guess is it has to do with UEFI/GPT housekeeping.

This is on a laptop with Win 10 Home pre-installed (Asus OEM). 

There are also a lot of other partitions on the disk, not included in the graphic.
 

 

It's just one of the partitions created by Windows "sometimes"....I don't know why.   I think Daffy's is a MBR formatted drive where your's is probably a GPT formatted drive which results in variations of types & names of partitions created by Windows during clean installs or upgrades.  

So as a test I did a full back-up of drive "C"

As said earlier Macrium Reflect only checks partitions 1 and 2 so wanted to see what actually happens.

Installed the test back-up on a spare drive and indeed it only showed partition 1 and 2,  seems the other partitions 3 and 4 are not needed.

All well and good but seems I'm stuck with the two useless partitions taking up space on the drive. 

Does not really matter as I have plenty of room on the drive but don't like the untidy look of it all. Maybe it would be possible to merge the unnecessary partitions into the primary No2 partition?

 

Something I've noticed since the "Upgrade" is the Notification thing at the bottom right corner is not working properly now. I still have the icon and it still shows the number of messages same as before but when clicking to view the messages there are non the page is blank. 
 

8 hours ago, Daffy D said:

Does not really matter as I have plenty of room on the drive but don't like the untidy look of it all. Maybe it would be possible to merge the unnecessary partitions into the primary No2 partition?

 

Yeah, depends on how much effort you want to put into reclaiming less than 1Gb of disk space, less than the size of one movie.

What is not being check-boxed by Reflect depends on the intelligence of the program -- so long as it lets you check-box manually don't sweat it, but you can try contacting them if you care to.  Maybe there's something in their FAQ about this.  I have 2 disk drives (one is USB) and when I bring up Reflect all 12 partitions are checked; I only image the C drive and that FAT32 partition, the rest I back up via file compare and copy.

 

 

16 hours ago, Daffy D said:

 

All well and good but seems I'm stuck with the two useless partitions taking up space on the drive. 

Does not really matter as I have plenty of room on the drive but don't like the untidy look of it all. Maybe it would be possible to merge the unnecessary partitions into the primary No2 partition?

 

If you are sure you don't need/want them, then just delete them.  But I expect only one of them is "activate" to be used in Recovery operations....and the other is leftover/non-active from a previous Windows install/upgrade and no longer serves any purpose.  Whichever recovery partition is active I would personally leave alone as it "may" come in handy in the future in fixing a Windows boot issue which might appear out of the blue some day.

 

Take a look at the two links below on how to review/delete recovery type partitions.  In the first link focus on post #9.  And although #9 also shows you how to delete a partition you might want to use AOMEI Standard to do that...it's free to download.  I've used AOMEI for other tasks like extending/shrinking partitions...great little, free program.   The second link is a AOMEI link also talking recovery partition identification/deletion.  I have personally used the info in the two links to delete under-needed recovery partitions.  In the first link I've only used the portion which talks how to identify the active recovery partition, but I expect the last few steps which show how to deleted an unwanted/non-active partition works just fine...it's just I've used AOMEI to do the deleting part.

 

https://www.tenforums.com/drivers-hardware/96389-why-two-recovery-partitions.html

 

https://www.disk-partition.com/articles/delete-recovery-partition-4348.html

 

Just as nice to know I just came back from a shopping trip to several malls with the wife.  While she was buying the groceries I went to several computer shops like ITCity that had a large selection of laptops....the great majority preloaed with Win 10...and used UEFI/GPT format.  Probably on around 6 laptops from Acer, Lenovo, Asus, HP, etc., I went into Disk Management to review the partitions and associated names.  Based on what I saw there was zero standardization....different number of partitions...some with one recovery partition, several with two recovery partition, and one with 3 recovery partitions.  But some of this variation was also caused by a couple of the laptops having dual drives (one M.2 SSD and one HD). 

 

Give those laptops a few years with their future owners to go thru a couple of Win 10 upgrades/reinstalls and lord knows what the partition makeup will look like. 

My Win10 Home computer self updated to 1809 (OS build 17763.253) without any drama, but now I notice the Right-Click > New context menu option is unreasonably slow for whatever reason? Anyone notice this or got a fix? Besides that all OK.