Hard Drive problem

I am pretty good with tech support for most computer problems. But, I
found a problem I have never seen before so here goes.
My daughter gave me an HP Pavilion dv5115nr Notebook. I started doing
basic clean up when I got to the hard drive I wanted to add a partition
and that went fine. The partition program showed something strange. Not
only the normal C:, D:HP_Recovery E:there was a 1gig partition with no
letter and 587.04 MB used. I started digging around in it and it looked
like a small Windows OS on there. Is there any good reason for that to
be there? If not what would be your best guess.
The General

The General wrote:

> I am pretty good with tech support for most computer problems. But, I
> found a problem I have never seen before so here goes.
> My daughter gave me an HP Pavilion dv5115nr Notebook. I started doing
> basic clean up when I got to the hard drive I wanted to add a partition
> and that went fine. The partition program showed something strange. Not
> only the normal C:, D:HP_Recovery E:there was a 1gig partition with no
> letter and 587.04 MB used. I started digging around in it and it looked
> like a small Windows OS on there. Is there any good reason for that to
> be there? If not what would be your best guess.
> The General

That maybe the software for the quick play feature that allows you to play a
DVD without booting a full blown OS.

joe wrote:
> The General wrote:
>
>> I am pretty good with tech support for most computer problems. But, I
>> found a problem I have never seen before so here goes.
>> My daughter gave me an HP Pavilion dv5115nr Notebook. I started doing
>> basic clean up when I got to the hard drive I wanted to add a partition
>> and that went fine. The partition program showed something strange. Not
>> only the normal C:, D:HP_Recovery E:there was a 1gig partition with no
>> letter and 587.04 MB used. I started digging around in it and it looked
>> like a small Windows OS on there. Is there any good reason for that to
>> be there? If not what would be your best guess.
>> The General
>
> That maybe the software for the quick play feature that allows you to play a
> DVD without booting a full blown OS.
>
>
Can it be removed?

The General wrote:
> I am pretty good with tech support for most computer problems. But, I
> found a problem I have never seen before so here goes.
> My daughter gave me an HP Pavilion dv5115nr Notebook. I started doing
> basic clean up when I got to the hard drive I wanted to add a partition
> and that went fine. The partition program showed something strange. Not
> only the normal C:, D:HP_Recovery E:there was a 1gig partition with no
> letter and 587.04 MB used. I started digging around in it and it looked
> like a small Windows OS on there. Is there any good reason for that to
> be there? If not what would be your best guess.
> The General

The partition with no letter is a hidden partition with a partition code
not recognized by Windows, hence no drive letter. It is either an
adjunct to the recover partition, or a diagnostic, or something
completely different.

You could use the Ranish partition manager (or another similar bit of
software) to determine the partition code, and to even change it to a
known type, either FAT32 (my guess) or NTFS. Thereafter, you could
examine it and see what is in it. Finally, you could change it back to
its original partition code... Ben Myers

The General wrote:
> joe wrote:
>> The General wrote:
>>
>>> I am pretty good with tech support for most computer problems. But, I
>>> found a problem I have never seen before so here goes.
>>> My daughter gave me an HP Pavilion dv5115nr Notebook. I started doing
>>> basic clean up when I got to the hard drive I wanted to add a partition
>>> and that went fine. The partition program showed something strange. Not
>>> only the normal C:, D:HP_Recovery E:there was a 1gig partition with no
>>> letter and 587.04 MB used. I started digging around in it and it looked
>>> like a small Windows OS on there. Is there any good reason for that to
>>> be there? If not what would be your best guess.
>>> The General
>>
>> That maybe the software for the quick play feature that allows you to
>> play a
>> DVD without booting a full blown OS.
>>
>>
> Can it be removed?

See my earlier reply. First, figure out what it is and how useful it
may be. If you feel it is useless, remove it. But if it is not
contiguous to the C: partition, it'll simply be another 1GB partition
used to store data. Not too useful to me in this era of drives with
hundreds of GB of capacity... Ben Myers