Too many weird looking HDD partitions

[skywalker29392]

Hello everyone,
This is my first time posting for help here. Pardon me if i flout any rules.
My laptop has windows 10 installed , I have recently repartioned the HDD to dual boot windows 8.1 I happened to look at my HDD partitions today . There are a lot of empty partitions marked with an asterisk. Can someone tell me how to delete those ?

ISSUE : I have recently getting 100% disk utilisation causing my system to crawl. I am thinking it has something to do with so many partitions. Is it possible to delete all partitions and only keep the one with windows 10 on? I have made a system image backup using Windows backup just in case . Image below
Thanks for help.

 

[USAFRet]

Hello everyone,
This is my first time posting for help here. Pardon me if i flout any rules.
My laptop has windows 10 installed , I have recently repartioned the HDD to dual boot windows 8.1 I happened to look at my HDD partitions today . There are a lot of empty partitions marked with an asterisk. Can someone tell me how to delete those ?

ISSUE : I have recently getting 100% disk utilisation causing my system to crawl. I am thinking it has something to do with so many partitions. Is it possible to delete all partitions and only keep the one with windows 10 on? I have made a system image backup using Windows backup just in case . Image below
Thanks for help.

A picture is worth 1,000 words.
Please show us a screencap of your Disk Management window, so that we're all on the same page.

 

[skywalker29392]

Hello everyone,
This is my first time posting for help here. Pardon me if i flout any rules.
My laptop has windows 10 installed , I have recently repartioned the HDD to dual boot windows 8.1 I happened to look at my HDD partitions today . There are a lot of empty partitions marked with an asterisk. Can someone tell me how to delete those ?

ISSUE : I have recently getting 100% disk utilisation causing my system to crawl. I am thinking it has something to do with so many partitions. Is it possible to delete all partitions and only keep the one with windows 10 on? I have made a system image backup using Windows backup just in case . Image below
Thanks for help.

A picture is worth 1,000 words.
Please show us a screencap of your Disk Management window, so that we're all on the same page.

Hi i had pasted link for image ****https://ibb.co/m8Re2d**** .

[/quotemsg]

 

[USAFRet]

Ah.
That is probably the result of multiple failed OS installs, and not cleaning up in between.

What do you want the end state to be? Dualboot or single?
Is a full reinstall of everything in the cards?

 

[skywalker29392]

Hi . I want single boot win10 and single partition. I am guessing that won't be possible without deleting all partitions and essentially reinstalling windows 10? I am fine with reinstalling . But is there another way where I can just save my win10 partition and delete all these rogue ones? Thanks for your help

Also , I been trying to run chkdsk on win10 drive but it keeps getting stuck at 11% for hours . Is it related? Drive is 1tb . Initial HDD diagnostic show no health issues .

 

[USAFRet]

In theory, you could "fix it".
But the fastest, best, most secure way....a clean install of Win 10, wiping out whatever is on that drive. All partitions.

Messing with and deleting/merging partitions always brings a level of 'potential fail'. Leaving you with doing a clean install anyway.
And will take far longer.

If you're fine with a reinstall, do that.
Guaranteed to work.

How to do a CLEAN installation of Windows 10

 

[skywalker29392]

In theory, you could "fix it".
But the fastest, best, most secure way....a clean install of Win 10, wiping out whatever is on that drive. All partitions.

Messing with and deleting/merging partitions always brings a level of 'potential fail'. Leaving you with doing a clean install anyway.
And will take far longer.

If you're fine with a reinstall, do that.
Guaranteed to work.

How to do a CLEAN installation of Windows 10

Thanks for the reply. i have decided on reinstalling everything from scratch. Have 2 doubts:

1. do i need to extract windows key from present installation or it will be uatomatically recognised?
2. when i boot off usb to install i delete all partitions? what about the recovery partition that came with HP? delete that too? can recovery be installed then later?

TIA

 

[USAFRet]

1. You don't need the license key. Being in the same system, it will just activate itself.

2. If that HP recovery partition still exists, you can use that to create a factory USB. Which is what you're supposed to do anyway. Then delete that partition.
But I wouldn't use that for the reinstall. Just keep it around in case you ever sell the system.