How to Deal with HP Tools Partition Properly?

This post shows what is HP Tools partition and how to do if you want to remove the partition without losing system diagnostics function.

Michael

By Michael / Updated on May 12, 2023

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What’s the HP tools partition?

If you have an HP desktop or laptop, you are likely to find there is an HP-tools primary partition on your hard drive. It does not have a drive letter, so you cannot see or access it in File Explorer. In Disk Management, you can see that this partition labeled as HP_Tools has about 100MB space and 0nly 10% of used space. This small partition is for BIOS updates and system diagnostics. As you know, for HP computers, you can press Esc at startup, and then F2 to access HP system diagnostic. If you delete this tiny partition or move the files in the HP_Tools partition, then HP System Diagnostics will not work anymore.

HP HDD

How to access HP_tools partition?

To better understand this partition, you can assign a drive letter to it, so you can see what in the HP Tools partition. To assign a drive letter with Disk Management:

1. Open Disk Management. You can type “diskmgmt.msc” in a Run box and press Enter.

2. Right-click on the HP_tools partition, and select ”Change drive letter and path”.

Drive Letter

3. In the next window, click “Add” to select a drive letter, for example, E:, and click ”OK”.

After opening this partition, you can see there are only a few megabytes of data on it. Since it has a drive letter, other programs also can access HP-tools (E) drive. Some malware may write data to it, which will lead to HP tools E: drive full.

HP-tools E: drive is full, how to clean up?

By default, the HP-tools partition has enabled System Protection. You can disable it through Control Panel > System Security >System > System Protection. In a pop-up window, click “Configure” to turn off system protection.

You can also open HP-tools partition in Windows File Explorer to delete some unwanted files. Delete the folder with user’s name, HP-HP, and the MediaID.bin file. After that, the low disk space on HP-tools partition should be gone.

Though it is small, it is also a primary partition. As a matter of fact that an MBR disk only allows you to have 4 primary partitions or less than 4 primary partitions and 1 extended partition.

For people who want to create more partitions on the hard drive, they want to delete this partition.

Safely delete the hp_tools partition

If you want to get rid of the HP_Tools Partition without losing the system diagnostics function, you can copy it to a USB flash drive with free partition manager software AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard. Then the USB drive will work just like an HP recovery disk. When you ever need to run the system diagnostics, you just plug in this USB drive. It is also recommended to create an image backup of this tools partition in case any unexpected problems happen. After that, you can safely delete this partition. The specific steps listed below:

1. Plug in a blank USB drive to your PC. Download this freeware, install and run it.

Download FreewareWin 11/10/8.1/8/7/XP
Secure Download

2. Right-click on the “HP-tools partition” and select "Clone Partition".

Clone

3. Choose a way to clone the partition.

Select Unallocated Space

4. In the pop-up window, select the USB drive, which should be shown as unallocated space, as the destination location.

5.  Here you can edit the partition on the target drive. 

6. Click “Apply” to start the copy process.

Apply

7. After finishing copying the partition, right-click on the tools partition and select ”Delete Partition”. Then click “Apply” to apply the operation.

Then you should be able to create a new partition by shrinking one of the existing partitions. However, this USB drive cannot be used to store other data, which is such a waste. If you use the AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional, you can convert the HP tools partition to logical partition without data loss. Then you can use this software to create more partitions.

Michael
Michael · Staff Editor
Michael is a professinal editor of AOMEI editor team.