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[#1]

I'm trying to find out what the two unlabeled partitions are on my new windows 7 laptop. In Computer Management, Disk Management, one 1.46 GB partition is indicated as an active, recovery partition; however, another 7.92 GB partition is shown only as primary. Is there anything on this partition or can i delete it? I can't access either of these two unlabeled partitions to view contents, as neither have a file system type showing up.

The user guide does not have any section on hard drive recovery, but it does have a section on back up and recovery disk creation. I'm guessing the recovery uses info on the 7.92 GB partition but i would like to know for sure. Thanks

[#2 · Accepted solution]

You can't access them easily because they don't want people messing with the contents and rendering them unusable.  The 1.46gb partiton is the Recovery Boot Partition.  That is what you boot into to run the Toshiba Recovery Process.  The 7.92GB partition holds the disk images for the recovery process.  Without them you can't restor the system to it's out of box state.  You can use the Recovery Disk Creator to burn a set of Recovery Disks that will perform the same function, but in my opinion it's better to keep them rather than delete them.  If the system has a problem while travelling and one doesn't have their recovery disks with them one is stuck with a non functioning laptop (of course travelling without these recovery disks is like driving a car without a spare tire). 

Full instructions on running the Recovery Process starts on page 61 of your User's Guide that is found on your laptop in Adobe Acrobat Format or downloaded from the Product Support Link at the top of this page.  I just checked the user's guide and that information IS included.

My advise is to immediately create two sets of the recovery disks.  Place one in the laptop bag so you always have them with you and place the other set in a safe place at home just in case.  Keep the partitions as they are easier to access than the recovery disks (you access the recovery process by holding down the 0 (sero) key while powering on the system).  That 10 gigs of space can't be enough to worry about.

[#3]

Yikes! I can't believe I missed it on page 61. I DID look. Now I'm afraid to tell you I couldn't find anything like it in the index either under hard drive, recovery, ....... but it IS in the contents under Getting Started. I must be in the twilight zone, or someplace it is so dark I can't see. Thanks

[#4]

Sometimes the wording can be confusing.  I've been doing this since the 70's so I know what to look for.

[#5]

You say that the 1.8GB and the 7.2 GB partitions are recovery images.

I cannot do a complete drive backup because I get an error "Operation Failed it is impossible to initialize VSS for processing volumes " when the 7.2 GB partition  is encountered by Paragon Backup and Recovery (Win 7 on model L355-S7902)

Any ideas what might be causing this failure?

[#6]

Not really.  I haven't used that program to backup a system.  I've always used either Norton Ghost, Powerquest's Drive Image, or more recently Acronis True Image.