DVDs are rejected by newer security technologies such as UEFI and SecureBoot. This is why my guides stress a FAT32 formatted USB flash drive made with Rufus. A dual boot is also a bit more tricky with UEFI and SecureBoot and in my opinion not worthwhile. Modern hardware is more than capable of running Windows as the host machine and Linux as a Virtual machine. I frequently use VMware Player for this: [URL]
I'm not exactly sure what all of the partitions shown in disk manager are for. I would almost bet the farm that I didn't have this many partitions when I originally bought my laptop. The laptop came with Win8 and I upgraded to 8.1 as it rolled out. A few months ago I did a factory restore as well. It's also possible I may have installed Dell Backup and Recovery more than once, I'm wondering if this has something to do with it. It just seems something is wrong and that I shouldn't have that many partitions, I certainly don't remember there being that many when I first got it. In particular I'm wondering about the 6 recovery partitions, 5 that are small and within disk manager appear to be empty. Though I do believe the 6th recovery partition, the large one does actually have the recovery data; because at one point I used a third party tool that indicated it wasn't 100% free space as disk manager shows.  There is also a 490 mb partition that is unallocated, , really confused by that, I'm sure that wasn't there originally. I've done some reading here and elsewhere about this, but I'm still confused as to why I have 10 partitions, what they are, and what is necessary.   If anyone can give me some insight on this I would really appreciate it.  Here is a screenshot of Disk Manager: [IMAGE]  Inspiron 15R (5537, Mid 2013)
What are these partitions?