Windows – would there be two separate recovery partitions

hard drivepartitioningwindows 8.1

I recently got a new Lenovo Y510P Laptop, with Windows 8.1, a 24 GB SSD drive, and a 1 TB Hard Drive.

When I opened up Disk manager, I realized that the Hard Drive was partitioned into six segments:

  • Two primary accessible partitions each with their own drive letter (one has OS)
  • one 260 MB EFI System partition (Boot partition)
  • one 1000 MB OEM partition (probably lenovo software)
  • one 1000 MB recovery partition
  • one 12.52 GB recovery partition

I am wondering why there are two recovery partitions and what possible use they could have because one seems to be too small to fit anything.

Best Answer

See Lenovo's article titled Understanding hard drive partitions on Lenovo systems with Microsoft Windows 7 and Windows 8 - ThinkCentre, ThinkStation, ThinkPad:

For Microsoft Windows 8, which requires three partitions, Lenovo created the Recovery Partition to allow the recovery of the initial operating system and software on the computer to the same state that they were in before the computer was activated. ... The far left small Recovery Partition, EFI System Partition and Windows 8 operating system partition, is required by Windows 8. The larger Recovery Partition is the Lenovo created partition.

There's also an explanation of Lenovo's partitioning scheme in a response to New G580 has seven partitions, Help identify? on the Lenovo support forum:

  1. WINRE_DRV 1000MB OEM - this is the Windows Recovery Environment - this has it's own interface / it doesn't need the 7th partition to operate
  2. SYSTEM_DRV 260MB System - check this thread
  3. LRS_ESP 1000MB OEM- The third partition is the EFI System partition which is used for data storage for the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) interface
  4. (blank) 128MB MSR - The fourth partition is the Microsoft Reserved Partition which is also used for data storage for the Globally Unique Identifier (GUID).
  5. Windows8_OS 884.2GB Primary - Windows 8 OS
  6. LENOVO 25GB Primary - this contains the Application and Drivers that are preloaded on the OS (the drivers listed on this folder are also available on the lenovo website)
  7. PBR_DRV 20GB OEM - this is your recovery partition - you will need to press the One Key Recovery button to activate this partition.
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