I have upgraded to Windows 10 a few months earlier from Windows 8.1, I have not checked my HDD arrangement after the upgrade. Now I can see that there are two partitions the "system reserved" and "recovery". Where these partitions came from? and Can I get red of them?
I hope that one of the experts in this forum give me some advise and thanks in advance.
The answer is NO. Don't get rid of them.
The 350 MB system reserved was created when you installed 8.1 and contains the Recovery Environment (WinRE.wim) + Boot Code (BCD). When upgrading to Windows 10, the Recovery Partition (500MB) was created and WinRE.wim was moved here.
Well, you actually can get rid of them, but I wouldn't recommend it. You can move/establish the boot files on the system reserved partition to your C: drive partition and change the active partition to your C: drive partition. You could also move the recovery environment files on the recovery partition to your C: or D: drive partition and point reagentc /setreimage to the new location. After moving the contents of the system reserved and recovery partitions and making sure they retained functionality, you could delete the extra partitions. I've done this before on my laptop just out of curiosity to see if it could be done.
To be safe it is always best to have an image backup of all partitions before making partition changes. If something went wrong you could loose everything. But since the total size of the System Reserved and Recovery partitions is less than 1 GB the disk space savings is trivial and not worthwhile.
And the space savings would be even less than the size of the partitions because the files in those partitions would still exist - just in a different place on the hard drive.But since the total size of the System Reserved and Recovery partitions is less than 1 GB the disk space savings is trivial and not worthwhile.
So, If I remove the recovery partition, I won't be able to enter the troubleshooting mode? Because I was thinking of deleting them as well. Could I use the Windows 10 DVD to make the hard disk bootable if I get into any problems? How can I transfer the boot code into C: ?
I have a similar issue - the hard disk of my Win 8 Lenovo desktop was originally divided between a C:, and D: drive and the OEM recovery drive (1000 MB). Since upgrading to Windows 10 the HD now also has an EFI system partition (260 MB), a OEM partition (500 MB), a second recovery partition (350 MB) and, of particular concern, a 24.4 GB third recovery partition See attached screen dump).The answer is NO. Don't get rid of them.
The 350 MB system reserved was created when you installed 8.1 and contains the Recovery Environment (WinRE.wim) + Boot Code (BCD). When upgrading to Windows 10, the Recovery Partition (500MB) was created and WinRE.wim was moved here.
While I can see the potential advantage of keeping the original Win 8 recovery drive, I would like to recover the space from the other partitions as I am low on disk space for my data (D: drive), particularly as all these additional partitions show that 100% of the space is free.
There are a number of suggestions in the responses to this question, but none actual how I can visualize these partitions to check that they really do not contain any data I might want to keep and these unwanted partitions can be deleted. Any suggestions as to how I can delete these unwanted partitions and free up the disk space would be appreciated
We need to see the results of: reagentc /info
run from an elevated ("run as administrator") command prompt, please.
You could try assigning a drive letter to the recovery partition (if possible), so you can browse the contents. But I doubt you will make out what is useful and what is useless. I would just make a full system backup, or even better clone the disk to another disk. Then I would get rid of any recovery partitions and expand Windows to take all the space. If anything goes wrong, I would have the backup or the clone.
MiniTool Partition Wizard free will explore just about any partition without having to assign it a drive letter and it will show system files that won't show up normally under Windows file explorer even if a drive letter is assigned.
The thing with manufacturer's recovery partitions is that most of them require the manufacturer's proprietary recovery software to actually use them. Lot's of people keep these ~25 GB partitions on their hard drives after they upgrade to Windows 10 and, in reality, they would not have the manufacturer's software required to do anything with them.
The first thing I do when I purchase a new off-the-shelf computer is boot it from a Macrium Reflect rescue disk and store an image of the hard drive on my NAS. Then I take a peek at the manufacturer's software load for about 24 hours, export the drivers, and then do a clean install of the OS I want on the computer without the manufacturer's bloatware by completely wiping the hard drive first. If I need to go back to manufacturer's software load, I restore the image I made from when the computer was new.
