Creating W8.1 hdd

[Rekusu]

What ho one and all,

Following on from the Setting up w8.1. I have spent the day trying to get 8.1 into a recognisable from, mainly with Classic Shell and removing most of the (expletive deleted) that both HP and MS think I (or my wife) will need.

However, when looking at the HDD, this is what I see.

Attachment 15432

What are Windows RE Tools? And *: System? Then there is *: What is that? C I am happy with but D not so much?

This is my plan; it is realistic? Get the OS working as best as I can with most of the software up and running. Create an Image partition at the end of C: (let's call it F and make an image of the OS and may be the same image to an exteranl drive.

Then format the inbuilt HDD to get rid of all these unwanted partitions and recovery software, which I don't even know how to access. Using the image recovery disk, copy the OS back to C: and hopefully I should now have one partition with the OS working. Or is it not that simple because anything beyond XP requires Win Tools RE / *: and the Recovery Image?

Thanks and toodle pip

[Midknyte]

Windows RE is the recovery environment partition. I wouldn't get rid of that.

System is the boot partition, so you definitely need that also.

I'm not sure what * is. Are there any files in it?

I think the RecoveryImage is the OEM recovery partition. If you want to do a factory restore, you'd need that.

I would create an image backup containing at least WinRE, System, and C: . It would probably be better if you restore the image backup to another HDD or SSD, rather than blowing away your original drive.