hi all. i switched to linux from windows on my msi ge72vr. there was a recovery partition around 70 GB. somehow i wasn't able to see it on windows/disk management neither in gparted on linux. is there a way to write really really factory sectors to hdd? i want to recover that partition. the hdd is 1tb but it shows 931gb free. any suggestions?

70GB for a Recovery partition seems a little large in my experience. Is this a standard windows recovery partition or is it a backup you created?

Which version of windows do/did you have? Which version of Linux do you have? Did you actually install Linux and if so what option did you choose? There are usually several including something like "erase disk and install ?Linux" which would have overwritten everything on the drive. If you can boot whichever Linux you have installed or the install media, access a terminal and login as root and run the command below. Some Linux systems require you to preface the command with sudo.

Lower Case Letter L in the command. Post the output here. I'm not really sure about the situation you are in but you should always have a backup of important data on another drive and generally, you would be better off using windows backup tools for windows partition, Linux for Linux.

Nothing to do with Linux, or for that matter Win. What you are seeing is merely a difference in representation. Search on the difference between gibibytes and gigabytes - your disk is 1000 GB, but only 931 GiB. The manufacturers always use the bigger (basically incorrect in computer terms) number.

Welcome to LQ (5/2017)!!!

A web-search of: 1000 GB but only 931 GiB
helps me 100%trust #3

I'm wild-guessing that the Win10 'recovery' partition was actually smaller
(&you assumed it [gone] was the [not]'missing' 70G)
And that you let someLinuxDistro overwrite whole disk,
so the 'factory' [recovery] Win10 is physically gone=erased
and the only way to get it back is a DVD/USB of Win10
(since you have the M$license, I think you can just dl@M$)
Note that Win10 will end up erasing your Linux (VBox next time?)

Hello and welcome to LQ.

I too tend to agree with syg00. Is there some reason you know there is a recovery partition? The BeOS OS was able to trick drives or at least CD's and use a odd way to make both a Mac and x86 image. Never heard of recovery partitions doing any special tricks other than maybe hide partition.

Well. Some manufacturers could not spend one euro for a dvd, so they put the windows installer on a recovery partition.

In my personal notebook experience on an asus g75vw. Go to microsoft.com download the windows 10 iso from microsoft. boot that, and skip the key question. when windows 10 is running with configured network, it will grab the windows key from the uefi and actiates windows 10. my notebook has a windows 7 or 8.1 key in the bios, which i upgraded with microsoft free windows 10 thing last year. As this was a second hand purchase, I have no idea which windows was on it at point of sale.
I doubt that there is a requirement for the recovery partition.

No idea where MSI stores it's windows keys. could be a sticker on the bottom. Could be in uefi also.

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I disagree with your statement. Could not see partition in gparted. I use gparted a lot with systemrescue-cd. for many many years. all those recovery partitions on notebooks are visible in gparted. and before systemrescue-cd i used gparted live-cd for quite a while.

It is more likely you nuked the partition table beforehand. or your operating system installer nuked that partition table beforehand.
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nope.

but you could ask msi support for the disk image. sometimes some manufacturers hand out those.

when you just need windows, do what i suggested above. +benefit no bloatware from msi. all drivers are anyway available usually from the manufacturer

edit: well i hope you learnt something. make backups before you do something. check with sysrescue-cd and gparted tool what is on the disc before. and only look before you overwrite something.


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edit 2:

when you know the partition boundaries you could recreate the partition table.
assuming nothing has written in sectors you need. (which is kinda impossible ...)

yeah it was default recovery partition. it's like bad sectors ffs. this is why i hate windows.rip 70gb..

Was my suggestion any helpful?

The issue is more with greedy notebook manufacturers to put hole recovery stuff on the harddrive. I had this also on my asus g70sg. I just nuked it. a billion saved when you do not have to make a billion recovery dvds. Same with the handbook.

Recovery partition is nice for those apple users. They are unwilling to learn. so the support tells them, press during startup this key combination and the bios will use the recovery partition to just reinstall windows. they are too stupid to just install windows. since windows 2000 it is just telling windows the date and time, and okay. and also the network settings.

-- samsung does not even give a quickstart guide to the tablet. all online. Not a single piece of paper telling the basics.

My 1 TB drive also shows as 931 GB

Assuming you ran df to get your free space? It will always show less than what was created due to system overhead (file system inodes ... etc.) By the way did you allocate with 1000 or with 1024 this also makes a difference:

e.g. a KILObyte is not 1000 bytes ... it is 1024 bytes. Therefore a megabyte is not 1000 kilobytes it is 1024 kilobytes:

1000 * 1000 = 1000000

1024 bytes (1K) * 1024 bytes (1k) = 1048576 <= Megabyte

1,000,000 bytes is not a megabyte there 1000000 * 100000 would not equal a gig.

1048576 * 1048576 however does equal a gig:

1048576 * 104856 = 1073741824 bytes or a Gigabyte.

1000000000 * 1000000000 is also not a TB.

1073741824 * 1073741824 = 1152921504606846976 bytes ... or a TB.

Even with proper numbers there is still overhead on the disk ... low level formatting // space used for the partition information // space used for the Physical Volume metadata is your using LVM // space used for the filesystem metadata (inodes) so you will not end up with exactly a TB.