[SOLVED] 29 Gig unknown partition on laptop drive

[klicklack]

Hello Guys,

I am currently running out of disk space on my laptop (Acer Aspire A315-41-R0KV with a 256 GB ssd running windows 10), and I found that there is a roughly 30 GB large partition on my disk that I don't have access to via windows explorer (see screenshot below). This is the state that the disk came in from the factory, Windows10 was already preinstalled. I would like to delete the partition and merge the space with my C:/ volume, but I am hesitant because I have no idea what the partition's purpose is.

I ran reagentc /info in powershell to confirm that this partition has nothing to do with the windows recovery agent, and I could verify that is the case. The windows partition manager would even allow me to delete the partition via a simple right click, it does not seem protected in the way the windows recovery partitions usually are. Windows partition manager also suggests that the partition was completely empty (100% free space) but I guess this information is not reliable because it also lists the EFI and recovery partition as 100% empty.

Does anyone have an idea what this partition's purpose might be and how I could find out more about its contents? Help would be much appreciated.

P.S.: I'm well aware this isn't really a question ABOUT windows 10, but I wasn't able to locate a category that would suit better in my opinion. If this is the wrong forum, please move this thread, thanks.

 

[Colif]

it appears to just be a normal partition. have you tried adding a drive letter to it? or formatting it?

i think efi & recovery partitions are so close to empty that they just show that way, mine shows same.

 

[klicklack]

I went into diskpart because I wanted to assign a drive letter to the partition and it appears that there is no volume associated with this partition. But that does not mean that is automatically emtpy, or does it?
I think no volume associated with the partition does not guarantee it is empty since there is no volume associated with the 16 mb MSR partition either.
If I went and formatted the unknown partition in order to create a volume and assign a drive letter to it, I would kill all data that might eventually reside in it, right?

 

[hotaru.hino]

This looks like the partition that holds a factory reset image in case you want to do a factory reset. You're free to delete it, but keep in mind you have to do a factory reset on your own if you want to sell it.

 

[USAFRet]

As above, that is probably the Factory Reset partition.
There should be a function in your user manual to write that out to a USB. This would be used in case the current drive dies and you want to return it back to Out Of The Box condition.

The,, you can repurpose that partition.
Delete, and extend the C partition into that space.

 

[klicklack]

Hello guys,

Thank you for your answers, and I guess you were all about right, it's just a regular partition. Turns out I had installed Ubuntu alongside my windows installation, I just forgot about it since I hadn't used it for quite some time at the point of writing. The laptop did of course not come with dual boot from the factory, I just wasn't aware that the drive had of course been partitioned by the ubuntu installer. It came back to me when I stared at the Grub screen when rebooting my laptop to check if anyone had posted new answers to my question 🤦‍♂️. I'm very grateful for your help nontheless, cheers.

What is interesting though is that the windows partition manager reports the partition as 100% empty, which it definitely isn't, it is rather almost full. Maybe this has to do with linux using another kind of file system than windows or something in that direction, I don't really know.