UEFI Partition?

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Just read Fred’s article about a missing UEFI partition. This HP laptop should have come with Win 8, but I specified Win 7, and as far as I know it uses UEFI. When I make a system image of the only drive, 240GB SSD, there are 3 partitions:

99MB “System Reserved” (which does not appear in File Manager, but it is shown in Easeus Backup):
221GB which is C drive:
2GB HP Tools (added by HP Support during updating). No sign of a UEFI partition as such.

I asked HP about the System Reserved partition and the agent was very vague. “That’s created by the initial installation…” was all I could gather. So now I’m wondering if this could be the UEFI partition? And if so should it be included in the System Image? I haven’t been including it until today, maybe I was lucky not to have needed to do a restore.

David

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You’re system is not configured as a UEFI system. UEFI booting requires a GPT partition layout, and your hard disk uses MBR partitioning.

If you want to verify it’s MBR-style, open Window’s Disk Management applet. In the schematic “bar graph” in the lower part of the window, right-click the label on the left end of the graph (where it says “Disk 0”) and select Properties. In the Properties window click the Volumes tab. There you’ll find the disk’s “Partition style” specified.

If it could have been ordered with Win8, your hardware probably supports either UEFI or traditional BIOS boot, but it’s presently configured as BIOS boot. While Microsoft required OEMs to use UEFI/GPT for Win8, it’s normal for Win7 to use the older BIOS/MBR configuration.

The 99MB partition is Microsoft’s SRP (“System Reserved Partition”). Your system starts booting from the SRP, so it presently won’t boot without it. (It’s possible to repair/reconfigure a system to eliminate the SRP, but at present your system is setup to require it.)

Ideally, you should be imaging both the SRP and your main Windows partition. However, note that the SRP doesn’t change so if you’ve imaged it in an earlier backup you can always restore the SRP from an older image if you have to.

It isn’t critical to image the HP TOOLS partition, though if you don’t some of HP’s OEM utilities might not work.

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Thank you for that very clear explanation. In the past I’d been creating images of C drive, today I made another image including that SRP, and HP Tools. So nothing can go wrong… can go wrong… can go wrong…

David.

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